Hungary cruise captain was involved in other crash
The captain of a cruise ship involved in a fatal crash in Budapest last week was behind a similar collision in the Netherlands in April, prosecutors said.
The Viking Sigyn crashed into a tourist boat, the Mermaid, on the Danube, on 29 May. The Mermaid then sank, killing 28.
The captain, a 64-year-old Ukrainian national named as Yuriy C, was later arrested. He denies any wrongdoing.
Prosecutors said he was the captain of a cruise ship involved in a non-fatal crash in April in the Netherlands.
Yuriy C was also accused of deleting data from this phone following the fatal crash in the Hungarian capital. Prosecutors said it was unclear whether the deleted data was related to the incident.
What happened in the crash in the Netherlands?
According to prosecutors, Yuriy C was the captain of a cruise ship that had collided with a cargo vessel while sailing from Antwerp to Ghent on 1 April.
Prosecutors said that Eurojust – an EU law enforcement network – confirmed that he captained the ship that crashed in the Netherlands, but did not give further details.
Collega's van @PolitieLE Dienst infrastructuur Zuidwest doen momenteel onderzoek naar een aanvaring tussen een passagiersschip en een zeeschip. Dit gebeurde vannacht op de Westerschelde bij #Terneuzen. Flinke schade en helaas ook gewonden pic.twitter.com/5CbG7GkuGN
End of Twitter post by @GAINFRA_ZW7
According to Dutch media reports at the time, the cruise ship was the Viking Idun, which was run by Viking Cruises – the same company that ran the Viking Sigyn.
Images taken in the aftermath and posted on social media showed the cruise ship with huge areas appearing to have been scraped off the side, while others showed the extent of the damage inside the ship.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BvsUnSAh3My/
In verband met een aanvaring tussen een tanker en een passagiersboot op de Westerschelde zijn de collega's lange tijd aan het werk geweest op de calamiteitensteiger in Terneuzen. Hiervoor is een apart actie kanaal geopend zodat de collega's onderling vrij kunnen communiceren. Collega's hebben ter plaatse een snelle inventarisatie gemaakt van eventuele gewonden. Er heeft een copi overleg plaatsgevonden. Diverse hulpverleners en instanties zijn ter plaatse geweest. ^TL ^EvL
A post shared by Politieteam Zeeuws-Vlaanderen (@pol_zeeuwsvlaanderen) on
End of Instagram post by pol_zeeuwsvlaanderen
No one was killed in the Netherlands crash, but reports said that some passengers had suffered minor injuries.
What happened in Budapest?
The Viking Sigyn cruise ship hit the Mermaid after 21:00 local time (19:00 GMT) on 29 May. It was the worst crash on the Danube in more than 50 years.
Most of those onboard the tourist ship were from South Korea, and were aged between 40 and 50. But the group also included a six-year-old child and a man in his 70s, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.
The bodies of seven passengers were recovered on the night of the disaster, and another seven tourists were rescued alive.
Since then, a total of 17 bodies have been recovered. Another 11 people are officially missing, presumed dead.
Officials said on Thursday that all of the bodies found so far have been identified, mainly because South Korea holds fingerprint data on all of its adult citizens.
Viking Cruises said in a statement last week that it was cooperating with the Hungarian investigation.
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