العثور على "سفينة الأسمنت" المفقودة التي تقلّ أربعة سودانيين بالقرب من بورتسودان

Quote: Ship owner Ashraf Farag told Al-Ahram Weekly that the ship was found stalled and immobile 70 miles away off Port Sudan shores on 15 February, and that a tugboat had been sent to pull it to the safety of Sudanese shores for repairs. The ship's fuel, according to Farag, had been mixed with water, thus affecting its performance. "The ship will appear within the next few days," Farag said confidently but without explaining why. "It did not sink and its 14 crew members are safe." He said he believed the lack of mutual contact with the ship was due to an excessive amount of static which impaired the ship's transmitting devices. Such faulty transmission prevented the GPS device (akin to a jet plane's black box) and SOS signals from working, thus causing a total loss of transmission. "This explains why the ship's captain was unable to send or receive messages to and from any of the concerned authorities," argued Farag. "Further details on the ship's whereabouts during the past weeks are currently being kept secret to preserve the safety of the ship as well as its crew," he said. However, Rania Mohamed of the Consular and Expatriates Affairs Department at the Egyptian Foreign Affairs Ministry, has declared that the ship's location is still unknown. "Reports in this respect suggesting otherwise are void from the truth," Mohamed said. "The ministry has contacted the Egyptian consulate in Port Sudan as well as the Egyptian Embassy in Khartoum, which are in constant contact with all the concerned Sudanese authorities. They all affirm that the ship has not yet been found and that it is not in the territorial waters of Sudan at all." Mohamed explained that the agent of the company in Port Sudan which owns the ship confirmed he has no information about reports that Badr 1 had been found. "The ministry is still pursuing contacts with all the concerned authorities in an attempt to locate the missing ship and that the search for it is still under way in all Red Sea ports," said Mohamed who expressed surprise at Farag's claim that the ship's location had been pinpointed. "This matter is not true," she added. But Fouad El-Reedi, head of Al-Kholafaa, the shipping agent of the missing ship, says otherwise. El-Reedi claims he has received information confirming the safety of the ship and crew but refuses to reveal his source or sources. "The ship did not sink, and the crew is safe." All necessary information will be revealed in time," he added. If indeed the crew is safe, the assertion clashes with the odd allusion by El-Reedi that Badr 1 could have been a victim of piracy. "There is a distinct possibility that multinational forces in Africa took possession of the ship under suspicion that it might have been transporting weapons to rebels in Chad," revealed El-Reedi. Mohamed Abdel-Moneim, Egypt's ambassador to Sudan, totally rejects El-Reedi's claims. Unlike fictional characters Captain Jack Sparrow and Captain Hook, there are modern-day pirates but Abdel-Moneim says piracy does not exist in the location of the Red Sea where the ship vanished. "There are pirates in other parts of the Red Sea but not this one," Abdel-Moneim said. "If pirates did attack the ship, they would have contacted the company of the crew to state their demands, but nothing has been announced up until now," he said. "It is against all international regulations to allow a ship built in the late 1960s to sail all the way from Suez in Egypt to Sudan. Also the shipping agent and the ship-owning company did not repay the cost of a search mission conducted by plane. "This is not the first time the ship's owner and agent report on the location of the ship," Abdel-Moneim said. "Last Thursday, the consul-general to Port Sudan and head of the Sudanese naval forces, in addition to other concerned authorities, searched for the ship at the exact location identified by them and found nothing." Although there is no credible evidence, "most probably the ship sunk, but we still hold out hope," the ambassador added.