Three crewmen died and three others were missing after a South Korean fishing vessel with a crew of 51 sank in icy waters in the Southern Ocean yesterday, as New Zealand rescuers abandoned their search.
The bodies of three Indonesian crewmen were recovered, but the South Korean master of the New Zealand-chartered Oyang 70 and two other Indonesian crew members were unaccounted for.
“Sadly, the chances of survival are now nil,” search and rescue coordinator Mike Roberts said after a 12-hour search by six fishing vessels in the area and an aerial sweep by a New Zealand Air Force Orion.
Forty-five survivors were recovered from life rafts, and Roberts said it was extraordinary that not more crewmen had died or been hurt.
“From what we understand, this was a catastrophic incident. The Oyang 70 sank in just 10 minutes. It is incredible that so many survived without injury,” he said.
The survivors, some of whom had mild hypothermia, were recovered from five life rafts by the New Zealand fishing vessel Amaltal Atlantis, which also located the three bodies.
The nationalities of the crew were listed as South Korean, Indonesian, Filipino and Chinese.
“We’re just looking after them as well as we can and once we’re released from the search we will be bringing them back to New Zealand,” Amaltal Atlantis skipper Greg Lyall said.
Roberts said the decision to end the search was difficult but a missing sixth life raft is believed to have gone down with the vessel and the crew would not have survived long in the bitterly cold water.
“The three [missing] men have been in the water for 12 hours,” Roberts said when he called off the search, adding that was beyond survival time in the icy waters even if they had been wearing full immersion suits.
It was not known what caused the South Korean-flagged Oyang 70 to go down, but Roberts said the sea was calm and it did not appear weather was a factor.
“We understand that she was hauling or recovering her fishing gear, with fish in the net, and she suddenly capsized and sank within 10 minutes,” Roberts said.
New Zealand’s Rescue Coordination Centre was activated when it received an alert from the positional indicator beacon on the 82m trawler at 4:40am.
Soon after, a mayday call was relayed by the nearby Amaltal Atlantis, which reported the Oyang 70 had sunk about 400 nautical miles east of the southern New Zealand city of Dunedin.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
Indonesia’s parliament yesterday amended a law to allow members of the military to hold more government roles, despite criticisms that it would expand the armed forces’ role in civilian affairs. The revision to the armed forces law, pushed mainly by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s coalition, was aimed at expanding the military’s role beyond defense in a country long influenced by its armed forces. The amendment has sparked fears of a return to the era of former Indonesian president Suharto, who ex-general Prabowo once served and who used military figures to crack down on dissent. “Now it’s the time for us to ask the
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
RSS