[120621.EN.SEA] Prosecutors Demand Deleted Emails in X-Press Pearl Inferno Case

 

SRI LANKAN prosecutors accuse X-Press Feeders and its parent, Sea Consortium, of a cover-up as court proceedings get underway in Colombo looking into the blaze and sinking of the 2,700-TEU X-Press Pearl, often described as one of the worst ecological disasters to hit the island nation.

The catalyst for the inferno on the X-Press Pearl is said to be a leakage of nitric acid, which was correctly declared but apparently incorrectly packaged, reported Singapore's Splash 247.

State prosecutors allege that Sea Consortium Lanka, the local agent for the ship, deleted key emails. The Singapore-registered X-Press Pearl reported an onboard acid leak to its representative Sea Consortium Lanka nine days before the ship entered Sri Lankan waters, but the agent failed to alert Colombo authorities, prosecutors say.

Emails between Sea Consortium and the Russian master of the X-Press Pearl, Tyutkalo Vitaly, had been wiped, they said. The court has demanded X-Press Feeders locate the emails from mail servers overseas.

Ports in Qatar and India had earlier refused to offload a leaking acid container which had been loaded onboard the three-month-old ship in Jebel Ali, Dubai.

Investigators are also going through the ship's voyage data recorder (VDR), which divers managed to retrieve over the weekend.

The X-Press Pearl's fate is the latest in a disappointing recent and persistent catalogue of containership fires of varying degrees of severity, which occur on an almost weekly basis.

The vast majority of these are initiated by a cargo of a hazardous nature. One estimate puts the number of mis- or undeclared dangerous cargoes in excess of 150,000 containers a year - each of which has disastrous potential.

There were around 25 tonnes packed on the 1,486 laden containers on the ship, as well as many tonnes of microplastics which have been washing on Sri Lanka's western shorelines over the past fortnight.

Source : HKSG / Photo : Splash 247.