Indian Navy and Coast Guard units were still searching the Bay of Bengal on Sunday for 22 crew members missing after a Panama-flagged bulk carrier sank off India’s eastern coast, with only two of the 24 people aboard recovered so far.
The vessel, the MV Ocean Winner, went down on Saturday while carrying a cargo of iron ore from Paradip in India’s Odisha state to Singapore. The Indian Coast Guard (ICG) placed the sinking about 240 nautical miles — roughly 445 km — off the Paradip coast, a position also reported by Hiru News citing Indian media. Ada Derana, drawing on agency copy, put the distress alert about 700 km east of Visakhapatnam.
Alert and rescue
The ICG’s Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre at Sri Vijaya Puram was alerted at 11:48 a.m. by a company associated with the vessel, which reported losing communication with the ship and requested search-and-rescue assistance, the Daily Mirror reported.
The centre diverted a commercial vessel operating nearby, the MT Aisopos, to look for the carrier or its liferafts. A navy patrol aircraft located liferafts in the area and coordinated with the MT Aisopos, which recovered two survivors from two rafts at around 8 p.m.
The ICG has since deployed the ships Varad and Anmol, with Vijit despatched from Sri Vijaya Puram to reinforce the operation. A navy patrol aircraft has been redeployed to survey the search area, and other vessels in the vicinity are being coordinated with.
Crew
The ship was carrying 20 Chinese nationals, three from Myanmar and one Bangladeshi, according to the ICG and the Press Trust of India. The nationalities and condition of the two rescued crew members were not immediately confirmed.
The circumstances that caused the vessel to sink have not been established. As of Sunday evening, Indian authorities had not reported any further recoveries.
