A Greek prosecutor on Saturday charged the captain of the sunken Sea Diamond cruise ship with negligence after the vessel foundered off an island in the Aegean Sea, an official said.
The search for two missing French passengers continued. The rest of the 1,154 passengers and 391 crew were safely evacuated after the ship hit rocks on Thursday and started to list.
The Greek captain was charged with causing a shipwreck through negligence, breaching international shipping safety regulations and polluting the environment, a Merchant Marine Ministry spokeswoman said.
But she said she could not confirm a report on state NET TV that five other officers who had been questioned had also been charged. She spoke anonymously in accordance with government practice.
She said the captain and the five other officers, who had been arrested after the accident, appeared before a prosecutor on the nearby island of Naxos on Saturday and have been released pending further investigations.
If upheld in court, the charges against the captain would mean up to a five-year sentence.
The ministry spokeswoman said the other officers questioned were chief mate, second mate, third mate, chief cabin steward, and housekeeper of the Greek-flagged vessel.
All six are Greek nationals, the cruise company, Greece-based Louis Hellenic Cruises, said. The company had no comment on the charges, and did not release the suspects' names.
The 143m vessel hit a well-marked and charted reef in fair weather inside Santorini's sea-filled crater.
The ship had been due to dock a few minutes later.
The sinking vessel was evacuated in a three-hour rescue operation, but Jean-Christophe Allain, 45, and his 16-year-old daughter, Maud, from Doue-la-Fontaine in western France were later listed as missing, feared to have been trapped in their flooded lower-deck cabin.
The ministry spokeswoman said the search for the two continued, while divers continued to investigate the hulk of the Sea Diamond.
Officials were also carrying out a clean-up effort for fuel that had leaked out of the 21-year-old vessel, which sank 15 hours after the accident.
"The vessel maintained the highest level of safety standards and was equipped with the latest navigation systems," said Giorgos Stathopoulos, spokesman for the ship's Cyprus-based operator, Louis Cruise Lines.
The ship underwent its last annual survey on March 9, and had been issued safety management and security certificates by Norway's Det Norske Veritas ship classification society, a DNV press release said.
Thursday's evacuation was the largest Greek rescue operation since the September 2000 Express Samina ferry disaster, which killed 80 people near the holiday island of Paros when it struck rocks in the night and sank.
It also created a major headache for officials in Greece's key tourism industry -- which accounts for an estimated 18 percent of the country's GDP.
"Whoever is responsible for this will be held accountable in the strictest way," Tourism Minister Fanny Palli Petralia said. "Greece is a major tourism destination and incidents like this must not be allowed to occur. ... Authorities handled the rescue very well."
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS