Mærsk Dubai

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The Mærsk Dubai was a now scrapped container ship owned by the Taiwanese shipping company Yang Ming Marine Transport Corp. which is best known from an incident in 1996 .

The ship

The ship was sold to China Shipbuilding Corp. in 1983 . - Built shipyard in Kaohsiung and has served the shipping company ever since. Until 1996 it was chartered by the Danish Mærsk Line and operated under the name Mærsk Dubai , then it was initially renamed Med Taichung and has been operating as YM Fortune since 2004 .

The ship is measured with 29,872 GT or 10,586 NRZ. With a length of 210.0 m and a width of 32.2 m, it has panamax dimensions . The maximum draft of the ship is 11.5 m. It sails under the Liberian flag , its home port is Monrovia (call sign: ELYQ2, IMO no. 8012671). The speed of the ship is 21.5  knots . The loading capacity is given as 1,984 TEU .

At the time of the incident, the crew consisted exclusively of Taiwanese ship officers and a majority of Filipino crew members .

The incident

In the first half of 1996 the ship operated between the Spanish Mediterranean port of Algeciras and the Canadian Halifax .

After the departure of Algeciras in March, the crew discovered two stowaways from Romania named Radu Danciu and Petr Sangeorzan. On March 12, the ship's captain, then 34-year-old Cheng Shiou, gave the order to throw the two passengers overboard. At this time, the crew stated, the ship was 70 km west of Gibraltar on the Atlantic . At the request of a machinist, the Romanians were equipped with a provisional raft, but they were never seen again after Vonbord Lassen. There are suspicions that the raft might have been sucked into the propeller. The crew was ordered to remain silent, and they said they had also paid bribes .

On May 17th of that year, the ship left Algeciras again. Previously, some crew members had sent a letter to a seafarer in Houston ( Texas ), in which they had reported on what was happening on board. In addition, the ship had been meticulously searched for stowaways prior to departure, with two Romanians being found and handed over to the port police. On May 18, according to the boatswain Roberto Rudolfo, another stowaway named Gheorghe Mihoc was found in one of the containers. The 18-year-old Mihoc was threatened with a knife by officers and the captain and thrown over the railing. A few hours later, sailors discovered a fourth Romanian named Nicolae Pasca. The ship's crew decided to hide it from the officers until it arrived in Halifax.

Detection and investigation

The Mærsk Dubai entered Halifax on May 24th . The four crew members Roberto Rudolfo, Jay Ilagan, Ariel Broas and Esmeraldo Esteban disembarked and turned to the police and journalists to testify against the officers. They remained in Canada for the time of the investigation. The families of the crew members in the Philippines reported reprisals from the shipping company.

The Mærsk Dubai was stormed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) on May 28 as a result of the crew's statements and detained in Halifax for ten months. After the crew members accused the captain of murder, a trial began in Canada. An investigation as part of the legal proceedings determined a water temperature of 16 ° C and wind force 6 for the specified location and the period of exposure . It was also found that the ship was even further from the mainland than originally stated, namely approx. 54 nm (approx. 100 km) from Spain and 79 nm (approx. 146 km) from Morocco. Experts said that the castaways had no chance of survival under the circumstances.

The Taiwanese government has claimed that the case should be dismissed because the incident occurred in international waters. In addition, the Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs allegedly paid funds to the shipping company to provide the captain with defense lawyers. Captain Sheng Chiou testified in the proceedings that he had released the stowaways a mile off the Moroccan coast. In addition, the bodies were never found. Attorneys Warren Zimmer and Jason G. Lin supported the captain's statements. Conversely, they presented the statements of the Filipinos as lies and imputed their complicity in the act, even if this allegation can be taken as an admission of the previously disputed act. They also alleged that their allegations were only intended to obtain asylum in Canada.

The court finally concluded, citing Articles 92 and 97 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea , that the Canadian authorities did not have jurisdiction over the case. A request by the Romanian government to extradite the accused to Romania failed because an extradition agreement between the two states only existed for crimes that were committed in one of the two countries. During the trial, Nicolae Pasca fled to the United States after testifying as a witness and now lives in Chicago . The total of three other stowaways who had gone overboard were never seen again and were later officially declared dead by Romania.

The Filipino seafarers were granted asylum and after the trial was over they were transferred to a homeless shelter. Only after years were their families able to immigrate from the Philippines. The seafarers have now found work in Canada. Three of them work for the Canadian Coast Guard, one in a hotel.

The trial against the captain was continued in Taiwan. The trial did not end until Sheng Chiou was acquitted in 2003. Taipei court found no evidence of the captain's guilt could be produced. Sheng Chiou was then demoted and taken to office work at the shipping company.

Others

The band Savatage released the 1997 concept album " The Wake of Magellan " based on the incident. The fictional story is about a descendant of Fernão de Magalhães , who actually wants to commit suicide in a rowboat, but then saves one of the shipwrecked stowaways. A newspaper report about the incident is printed in the CD booklet.

In 2004 the event became the content of the novel "The Stowaway" by Robert Hough ( ISBN 1559707801 ).

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