Philippines to deploy seaplane to find missing Vietnamese ship

MANILA, Philippines—The Philippine Coast Guard will send one of its seaplanes to scour the waters off Northern Luzon Wednesday to locate a Vietnamese cargo ship, which has been missing since Christmas Day.

Philippine, Japanese and Taiwanese coast guards and air forces have been conducting a week-long search for the 190-meter long bulk carrier Vinalines Queen with 22 crew members which went missing off Batanes province at around 7 a.m. on December 25.

“We haven’t called off the search; our search and rescue operations continue at the vicinity of where we believe the ship was when it went missing. But we still don’t know precise location where it sank,” PCG spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Algier Ricafrente said in a phone interview Tuesday.

On December 30, Vietnam’s Marine Rescue Cooperation Center information from the Taiwanese rescue agency said that a British-flagged ship, the London Courage, found one of the Vinalines Queen’s crew adrift on a life raft.

The London Courage is expected to reach Singapore on Wednesday.

According to Vietnamese media reports monitored by the Inquirer, the rescued crew member, Dau Ngoc Hung, has been able to speak to his wife by phone. He claimed the Vinalines Queen sank and he was the sole survivor.

Hung was rescued around 350 kilometers west from the area where the ship sent out its last distress signal.

A Vietnamese newspaper, Thanh Nien, said that since the Vinalines Queen went missing, the family of one of the missing sailors tried to contact his phone and the number rang sometimes but nobody answered.

There have been suspicions that the ship might have fallen into the hands of pirates as the vessel was carrying 54,400 tons of nickel ore from Indonesia’s Morowali port to Ningde port in China.

The ship’s last distress call stated that that vessel encountered a storm and had listed 18 degrees.