BHUBANESWAR: The Indian Navy and the Indian Coast Guard have intensified the search operation to trace the missing crew members of the Panama-flagged cargo vessel Ocean Winner and ascertain the status of the vessel, which disappeared from the tracking systems nearly two days after leaving Paradip Port.
After rescuing two crew members from life rafts, the Indian Navy has continued to closely coordinate with the Indian Coast Guard in the Search and Rescue (SAR) operation to locate the remaining 22 crew members.
Sources said that after receiving a distress alert regarding MV Ocean Winner, which was located about 290 nautical miles from Paradip Port, an Indian Navy P-8I aircraft, which was on a surveillance sortie, was redeployed for the SAR mission in coordination with the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) at Sri Vijaya Puram.
Earlier, the Indian Naval aircraft detected a geographically dispersed life raft in the area and coordinated with MT AISOPOS, a merchant vessel transiting nearby, to render assistance. By late evening on August 22, MT AISOPOS rescued two of the 24 crew members from the life raft.
The vessel, which departed Paradip Port carrying around 71,000 metric tonnes of iron ore bound for Singapore three days ago, reportedly went off the tracking system, raising concerns over its whereabouts and a possible maritime emergency.
The vessel was carrying 24 crew members, including 20 Chinese nationals, three Myanmar nationals and one Bangladeshi national.
The ship is around 225 metres long and 32 metres wide.
It was reportedly detected moving in the Bay of Bengal on Thursday, but no tracking signal has been received for nearly 24 hours since then.
The sudden disappearance of the vessel’s tracking signal has raised concerns over whether it was facing a technical malfunction, an emergency situation at sea or any other incident. The vessel had departed Paradip Port at around 10.30 am on Wednesday.
An Indian Coast Guard source said that whenever a vessel disappears from surveillance and tracking systems, standard procedures are immediately initiated to ascertain whether the loss of signal is due to technical failure, intentional disabling of the Automatic Identification System (AIS), or an emergency at sea.
