Two Rescued After Cargo Ship Sinks Off Odisha; 22 Missing
Two of 24 crew members of the Panama-flagged MV Ocean-Winner have been rescued after the cargo ship sank in the Bay of Bengal off Odisha; the search for the remaining 22 continues.
Bhubaneswar: Two of the 24 crew members of the Panama-flagged cargo vessel MV Ocean-Winner, which sank in the Bay of Bengal, have been rescued, and the search for the remaining missing crew is under way, the Indian Navy said on Sunday.
The ship sank around 240 nautical miles off the Odisha coast on Saturday, prompting a major search-and-rescue operation by Indian maritime authorities. It had left Paradip Port at about 10:30 p.m. on August 20 carrying around 1,700 tonnes of iron ore bound for Singapore. The 24 crew members comprised 20 Chinese nationals, three from Myanmar and one from Bangladesh. Officials confirmed the vessel was loaded with iron ore from Odisha.
In a statement on X, the Eastern Naval Command said that on August 22, responding to a distress alert for MV Ocean-Winner approximately 700 km east of Visakhapatnam, an Indian Navy P-8I aircraft on a surveillance sortie was rapidly re-deployed for a search-and-rescue mission in coordination with the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) at Sri Vijaya Puram. The aircraft located a geographically dispersed liferaft and coordinated with the nearby merchant tanker MT AISOPOS, requesting it to render assistance. By late evening on August 22, MT AISOPOS had rescued two of the 24 crew members from the liferafts.
