Probe after loss of Cyprus-flagged ship

By Jean Christou

A MERCHANT Shipping Department inspector was on his way to Canada yesterday after the sinking of a Cypriot-flagged freighter with the loss of 21 crew.

A helicopter plucked four of the crewmen from an overturned lifeboat in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on Friday, but 15 of their fellow crew members drowned and six were missing after the Flare sank, Canadian authorities said.

It is the first serious accident to a vessel flying the Cyprus flag in 1998.

Shipping Department Director Serghios Serghiou told the Cyprus Mail an inspector already stationed in New York has instructions to travel to Canada.

The Flare, a bulk carrier, went down off the French-governed islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon.

Lt. Commander Glenn Chamberlain, a spokesman for the rescue

centre in Halifax, said the four survivors – three Filipinos and a Romanian – were suffering from hypothermia and that one had a broken arm. There were no signs of any other survivors.

A garbled Mayday message from the Canada-bound ship was

picked up at about 5am on Friday by a coast guard station in Newfoundland. Waves in the area near Newfoundland’s Burin Peninsula were as high as four metres.

The Flare was sailing from Rotterdam, Netherlands, to pick up a cargo of grain in Montreal.

“Of the casualties so far this year this is the most serious,” Serghiou said. The Cyprus registry has more than 2,500 ships. By far the biggest casualty in 1997 was the sinking of the Leros Strength off Norway last year with the loss of its entire 20 polish crew members.

In 1996, the Cyprus flag sustained the third highest number of ship losses from 57 registries.

Cyprus sustained more than three times the losses of other registries except for Panama and China, but surpassed both of these countries in terms of tonnage lost.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.