Missing cargo ship apparently found near Cape Verde

(Version anglaise seulement)

The French Defense Ministry says a Russian-manned cargo that vanished in the Atlantic last month has been found near Cape Verde.

French Defense Ministry spokesman Capt. Jerome Baroe says Cape Verde coast guards have confirmed the Arctic Sea was discovered Friday afternoon about 520 miles (840 kilometers) off the former Portuguese colony off the West African coast.

The Arctic Sea has been missing since it passed through the English Channel on July 28.

The Maltese-flagged freighter sent radio messages as it sailed south along the coasts of France and Portugal, but then all contact was lost.

France was involved in search efforts together with several other countries.

The Arctic Sea — carrying a load of timber and 15 Russian sailors — passed through the English Channel on July 28. The Maltese-flagged freighter sent radio messages as it sailed along the coasts of France and Portugal, European officials said Friday. Then all contact was lost, which triggered an all services alert from Russia.

French officials then found a ship resembling the missing Arctic Sea near the Cape Verde islands, according to the French Defense Ministry and details were relayed to Russian and Maltese authorities.

The Russian state news agency ITAR-Tass and the German paper Financial Times Deutschland reported earlier Friday that the ship had been spotted near Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony off the coast of West Africa. ITAR-Tass, reporting from London, cited unidentified officials at NATO; the newspaper cited two sources but did not identify them.

Russia's ambassador to Cape Verde said a Russian naval frigate was headed to the area. Alexander Karpushin said on Russian radio, however, he had no information on the Arctic Sea's location. The Russian Navy spokesman was not answering his phone.

NATO spokesman Cmdr. Chris Davies, at NATO's maritime headquarters in England, said NATO was monitoring the situation but was not directly involved in the search.

Mystery had deepened last Wednesday over the missing Russian-crewed cargo ship last seen in July in the English Channel, as experts debated whether pirates, a mafia quarrel or a commercial dispute were to blame.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ordered his navy to join the search for the Arctic Sea, which left Finland with its timber cargo on July 23 bound for the Algerian port of Bejaia -- but has not been seen for two weeks.

Swedish police say the ship was hijacked in the Baltic Sea on July 24, when masked men claiming to be anti-drugs police boarded the ship, tied up the crew and searched the vessel.

But the men reportedly left after about 12 hours.

Following the Arctic Sea's disappearance, however, maritime experts are questioning whether the hijackers remained in control of the ship as it passed through the Channel and headed out to sea.

Britain's Maritime and Coastguard Agency spoke to someone on board on July 28, as the ship passed through the Strait of Dover, and everything seemed normal.

"There didn't seem anything suspicious when contact was made. It could well be that a crew member had a gun put to his head by a hijacker when contact was made, but who knows?" said MCA spokesman Mark Clark.

Pirates are active in many parts of the world, particularly off the coast of Somalia where hijackers seized more than 130 merchant ships last year, according to the International Maritime Bureau.

Attacks in European waters however are extremely rare, and Clark said he believed that if the Arctic Sea had been hijacked, it would have been the first such incident in living memory.

The ship is linked to an automatic tracking system, but the last signal was received on July 30, showing it was off the coast of northwestern France.

Swedish police revealed Wednesday they had been in telephone contact with the crew on July 31, but refused to give any details.

However, spokeswoman Ylva Voxby told AFP that detectives expected the Arctic Sea to return soon.

“The boat is planned to return to the Baltic at the end of August. We are planning to interview the crew then," she said.

Maltese officials said they believed the ship, which flies under a Maltese flag, is in the Atlantic Ocean.

"It would appear that the ship has not approached the Straits of Gibraltar, which indicates that the ship headed out in the Atlantic Ocean," said a statement from the Maltese Maritime Authority.

The ship, which is carrying 6,700 cubic metres of sawn timber, failed to arrive in Bejaia as planned on August 4.

Experts believe piracy is not the only answer to the disappearance, saying it could be caused by a commercial dispute or even a quarrel between different factions of Russian organised crime.

While the ship's operating company, Solchart Management, is in Finland, officials believe it is linked to the Russia-based Solchart Arkhangelsk.

"It doesn't look like bog standard piracy. If it's standard piracy, where's the ransom?" said David Osler, industrial editor at maritime newspaper Lloyds List, who raised the Russian mafia possibility.

He suggested it may have been part of a "drugs deal gone wrong", noting the hijackers' claim to be anti-drugs police and their search of the ship.

"Another possibility is a hijack to order. You steal the ship, respray it and sell it on," he told AFP.

"But the ship was built in 1991 -- who would go to the trouble of hijacking that to order?"

Maritime intelligence expert Nick Davis, chief executive of Merchant Maritime Warfare Centre, said a commercial dispute was likely.

"It's not carrying a valuable cargo, so I strongly suspect this is a commercial dispute with its owner and a third party and they have decided to take matters into their own hands," he told the BBC.

He said the Arctic Sea was unlikely to have sunk, saying: "You can't lose the vessel with all that cargo without telltale signs being washed out." A man who answered Solchart Management's phone in Helsinki refused to comment.

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