Russia has found a missing merchant ship near the Cape Verde islands and the crew have been taken aboard a Russian vessel, defence minister Anatoly Serdyukov said this afternoon.
He told President Dmitry Medvedev that the crew of the Arctic Sea, whose disappearance had baffled authorities in Europe and North Africa, were alive.
"Today at one o'clock in the morning Moscow time, the ship was found 300 miles off the Cape Verde islands," Mr Serdyukov told Mr Medvedev during a presidential visit to the southern Russian city of Astrakhan.
"The crew have been transferred to our anti-submarine ship, the Ladny, where they are being questioned to clarify all the circumstances of the disappearance," he said. "The crew are all alive and well."
The Kremlin ordered Russian warships to join the hunt for the 4,000-tonne, 98-metre bulk carrier Arctic Seaafter it went missing in European waters.
The Maltese-registered vessel, carrying a $1.3 million cargo of timber, was supposed to have docked on August 4th in the Algerian port of Bejaia.
Reuters