An oil tanker, carrying 750 tons of diesel and heading from Egypt to Malta, was shipwrecked on Saturday in the Gulf of Gabes, on the south-east coast of Tunisia, provoking a major mobilization to avoid an oil slick. “The ship sank this morning in Tunisian territorial waters. At the moment, there is no escape,” a spokesman for the Gabes court told AFP.
According to the spokesman, Mohamed Karray, “a disaster reduction commission will meet in the next few hours to decide what action to take.”
Environment Minister Leila Chikhaoui went to Gabes “to assess the situation... and make the necessary preventive decisions in coordination with regional authorities,” the ministry said.
The authorities had activated “the national emergency plan for the prevention of marine pollution with the aim of controlling the situation and preventing the spread of pollutants”.
The oil tanker 'Xelo' (registration OMI 7618272), 58 meters long and 9 meters wide - according to the Vesseltracker site - and which flies the flag of Equatorial Guinea, was heading towards the island of Malta from the port of Damieta in Egypt, according to the ministry.
To protect itself from bad weather conditions, the ship had applied to enter Tunisian territorial waters on Friday night.
When it was about 7 km from the coast of the Gulf of Gabes, the tanker began to sink, according to the ministry. The water leaked into the engine room, rising to almost two meters in height.
The Tunisian authorities then evacuated the seven-person crew who was on board the ship in danger, the ministry added.
According to the court's spokesman, the crew members, consisting of one Georgian captain, four Turks and two Azerbaijanis, were “briefly hospitalized for medical examination and then accommodated in a hotel”.
The Ministries of Defense, Interior, Transport and Customs are working to prevent “a marine environmental catastrophe in the region and limit its repercussions,” said the Ministry of Environment.
When the ship had not yet sunk, the ministry had described the situation as “alarming” but “controlled”.
The Gulf of Gabes was traditionally a fishing area, but activists say it has suffered contamination from phosphate processing industries located near the city of Gabes.
The last maritime accident involving the country was in October 2018, when the Tunisian freighter Ulysse collided with Virginia, based in Cyprus and anchored some 30 km from the far north of Corsica, causing hundreds of tons of fuel to be dumped into the Mediterranean.
It took several days of maritime maneuvers to untangle the ships and pump about 520 cubic meters (18,365 cubic feet) of propulsion fuel that had escaped from the tanks.
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