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Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years
- Sargos 5y agoI don't understand why he couldn't just get on another ship and leave forever. Worst case you just never go back to that shitty country right?
- Robotbeat 5y agoSo... never be able to captain a ship that goes through the SuezCanal?
- FridayoLeary 5y agowithout a doubt, there's at least one person in egypt, who is permanently barred from sailing so much as a rubber dinghy....
- Sargos 5y agoHow many times does he need to captain a ship to make up for 4 years of lost wages? That's not even accounting for the psychological toll.
- robertlagrant 5y agoWasn't he being paid for that time?
- abcc8 5y agoIf your livelihood depends on shipping, being unable to return to Egypt likely represents a significant barrier to obtaining future employment. Also, he may just have been extradited back to Egypt by another government.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoHe should have scuttled the ship once the maintenance crew left.
- speeder 5y agoAs he said in the article, it is because he has no intention of abandoning his profession and will resume working, meaning if he had left the ship his career would been ruined.
- nicklecompte 5y agoApparently his passport was confiscated[1] so he wouldn’t have been able to do so legally, nor return home even if he did manage to get on a ship. And if you work in international shipping it’s not very good for your career to be blacklisted from Egypt. [1] https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/chief-mate-stranded-on-abandoned-freighter-for-four-years https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/chief-mate-strand...
- akudha 5y agoHe was on a ship, alone, with no power/sanitation etc. How is this not inhumane and cruel? I can understand confiscating someone's passport if that person is a criminal, but this? This is like Saudi Arabia taking the passports of its laborers. It is insane that things like this happen, in 2021
- crazygringo 5y agoI'm curious, if he did manage to get on a ship surely he'd be able to return home to Syria on a ship bound there? I mean, if you're an American citizen heading home and you lose your passport on the walkway to board your plane in France... it's not like America's going to prevent you from entering, right? Surely it's gonna take some time to verify who you are and fix the situation. But it's not like you're forever banned from your own country. Leaving Egypt might have been too difficult logistically to pull off, but once he had I don't see any legal difficulty returning home.
- nicklecompte 5y agoAccording to US law (and I am assuming Syrian law) that is true...assuming the government is stable and the country doesn't have a devastating stalemated civil war. Getting into Syria with a legal passport is difficult enough, and Syrian border officials would have good reason to suspect that he was a foreigner. He would likely be thrown on a plane to Cairo and told to figure it out at the Syrian embassy. Although now that I write it out maybe this wouldn't have been a terrible option (albeit Kafkaesque and prone to several bureaucratic failures - and it doesn't solve the problem of him "abandoning his post" and breaking Egyptian law). Even so, US authorities do not just take "sorry fellow USicans, I lost my passport" at face value and will likely detain you until you are able to prove you are a citizen, and put you through quite a bit of extra screening and interrogation. Realistically it would be less of an issue for a white person with a bland American accent, since Border Patrol would probably let you call a lawyer or family member to bring a birth certificate. But I am quite sure an El Salvadoran-American who forgot his passport would not be able to enter the US from Mexico without incredible legal difficulty - again to the point where it would be faster and considerably less traumatizing to just go to a consulate and wait a few weeks.
- xwdv 5y agoNope, worst case you get blackmailed into being a sea slave until you’re no longer useful and dumped in the ocean to die.
- quickthrower2 5y agoHe would be a fugitive. Not everyone wants to do that. People in the US sometimes get jailed for years without conviction pending a trail. Why don’t they break out and leave the country? Because that would be a worse situation.
- AdamJacobMuller 5y agoI saw this video from Chief MAKOi (who has an excellent youtube channel in general) about this situation a week ago. It seemed rather hopeless for him at the time considering that it was going on for four years already. I wonder if that video contributed to pressure to fix the situation, it does have almost a million views. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zD-KjuGuiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zD-KjuGuiM
- hknapp 5y agoThis channel is how I heard of it.
- tomc1985 5y agoHow was he being supplied before the ship ran aground?
- FridayoLeary 5y agoaccording to news articles he SWAM to shore to pick up basic supplies. Not even a small rowing boat or something was made available to him.
- hn8788 5y agoThat was only after it ran aground. The article says that before that, he was anchored, presumably far enough out that he had no way to get to shore.
- Magi604 5y agoIn the article it states that he started swimming to shore only after the ship had run aground a few hundred meters from the shore. So the question remains, how did he sustain himself beforehand? Did the ship have years worth of supplies for him on board?
- FridayoLeary 5y agoi'm sorry, my error.
- Magi604 5y agoAll good my friend. I found the article to be really poor actually. It seems a lot of details were left out, possibly for maximum effect at editorializing the situation.
- patentatt 5y agoSo, does that mean this guy's been eating Bahrainian MREs for the whole time?
- abhijat 5y ago
- jandrese 5y agoIt is supremely unfair for the court to assign him full responsibility for the ship, but without any power over it. If the court were serious about the situation they should have handed the ship over to him entirely. He could then put the ship up on the market for whomever wanted to buy it or sell it to a scrapping company. If you think this would be unfair to the ships owners this is exactly the point. Force them to fix the situation or lose control of it entirely. Don't leave an actual human in some Kafkaesque nightmare of being jailed on a derelict vessel because you are terrible at running a shipping company. The article says there are hundreds of these cases around the world, and because only regular people are being harmed nobody is trying that hard to fix it. This is unconscionable. Edit: Fixed my faulty memory about the number of ships in this situation.
- newsclues 5y agoIf you dig into the class of people who own ships, you’ll realize that the government doesn’t want to offend the wealthy class.
- DoreenMichele 5y agoA lot of shipping issues are complicated because we have no global government and we have a lot of international waters and shipping, by its very nature, tends to involve ships passing from one legal jurisdiction to another repeatedly. It's not about not wanting to offend wealthy people. It's in part a matter of "Who has authority here?" There's a lot I don't understand about it, but this seems like it's probably a fairly modern development and it's high time we created meaningful solutions so this cannot happen again. Glad to see he got free and a reporter was talking to him and he was broadcasting via internet. But that should not be how something like this gets resolved, on some kind of ad hoc basis after so long. And someone here said someone volunteered to take his place, so it's apparently not really resolved, though he got relief.
- warmwaffles 5y agoI don't know how collateral on a mortgage on a ship this size works. But I am pretty sure even if they handed it to him, he couldn't do anything with it because it would have a Lein on it. Your point still remains valid though.
- modeless 5y agoWhy would you write an article like this without a word describing the legal consequences of leaving the ship? What consequence would be worth four years of your life? Edit: a more useful video linked below explains that the authorities confiscated his passport. That would make it difficult to leave. Though I'd probably try anyway after a year of that.
- patentatt 5y agoBut that alone doesn’t prohibit him from going to live on land somewhere, right?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ectopod 5y agoIf they've got his passport and he can't leave the only option is Egypt. I expect he thought of that and they refused. ETA: I've read a few of these articles over the last year. There have been many similar cases because of covid. It seems to be completely normal practice for countries to refuse visas to ships' crew.
- codezero 5y agoI imagine that a legal system that forces a random guy to stay trapped on a ship for four years would do something worse to someone who defies their order.
- _fat_santa 5y agoI saw this video[1] on Youtube that goes a bit more in depth into the situation. Apparently after he became the legal guardian of the ship, the Egyptian govt took his passport to prevent him from leaving. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zD-KjuGuiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zD-KjuGuiM
- randyrand 5y agoBut you are not stranded on Egyptian land. You're at sea. Why not just take some boat home? Or to the nearest non-Egypt country.
- dilippkumar 5y agoIf he had silently sneaked off the ship, would someone have noticed? How long would it take for anyone to notice that a ship without power and crewed by just 1 person was actually abandoned?
- notJim 5y agoI was wondering about this. My guess (just a guess) was that since he wants to still work in this industry, he was afraid that abandoning the ship would hurt his career? Either that, or he's just an incredibly responsible person.
- bluescrn 5y agoIf you’ve been unjustly imprisoned for several years, you probably don’t worry too much about your career?
- Gabriel_Martin 5y agoI found the last line almost unbelievable "It's enough, you might imagine, to make him think twice about going back to sea. But he is determined. He says he is good at his job and wants nothing more than to pick up where he left off."
- quickthrower2 5y ago“Final question. give me an example of a situation where...”
- javert 5y agoEver heard of graduate school?
- kevingadd 5y agoThe big problem would have likely been how to get home without drawing the attention of the local authorities. EDIT: Apparently his passport may have been confiscated.
- vaughnegut 5y agoAnyone know how the issue was resolved? The article doesn't actually say what changed about his situation to allow him to leave.
- speeder 5y agoI saw another article explaining a local leader of the seafarers guild/union offered to stay in his place.
- MereInterest 5y agoHoly crap. So not even with a return to judicial sanity, or a sanction against the ship's owners, but with somebody else offering to be the scapegoat?
- throw_away 5y agoget ready for another article in four years…
- snthd 5y agohttps://www.itfseafarers.org/en/news/seafarer-mohammad-aisha-going-home-thanks-itf-ending-four-years-abandoned-ship https://www.itfseafarers.org/en/news/seafarer-mohammad-aisha...
- dQw4w9WgXcQ 5y agoBut he is determined. He says he is good at his job and wants nothing more than to pick up where he left off. Meanwhile HN commenters be moaning every time their scrollbar is hijacked by a link or they have to deal with spaghetti code at work like "I'm so burned out"
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 5y agoIf this guy was staring at the same code I stare at hours per day he would probably also be moaning at times.
- NullPrefix 5y agoCan someone send a Laptop to Aisha so he could look at spaghetti code?
- coding123 5y agoSo true
- cigaser 5y agoFor me bigger problem is that Egypt left dead ship near Suez Canal in Red Sea for 4 years. If it would crash into tanker...
- eastbayjake 5y agoThe Egyptian legal system is not known for its fairness... the World Justice Project ranks it 125 of 128 surveyed countries, in last place out of 8 countries in the Middle East[1] Similarly (and tragically) the Syrian government is not known for its compassion towards its distressed citizens. [1] https://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/country/Egypt https://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/country/Eg...
- user3939382 5y agoMost people may think I’m being pessimistic and jaded. But I think these rankings are hilarious (in a bad sense). Just like the corruption rankings that come out. The US gets a green square and a high rank, smaller countries are corrupt and unfair. I could fill up paragraphs about how corrupt and dysfunctional our (US) legal and political systems are. Meanwhile I spent a long time in Central Africa (a red square country) and know to compare. I don’t get the purpose of these rankings.
- akarma 5y agoLooking at the WJP Rule of Law Index linked above, it's considering factors like constraints on government powers, absence of corruption, and fundamental rights. As someone involved in law in the US, the US is really good at these types of things. People, including Americans who have lived here their entire lives, are consistently amazed when they learn the power of the court and how functional it all has managed to be.
- FredPret 5y agoYou think Central Africa is less corrupt and more just than the USA? Jeez, that takes the cake hey. I’m from Africa, have left now, and this is pure nonsense. The USA doesn’t have to be literally perfect for it to be a good place.
- hcurtiss 5y agoSame. I help put deals together with some experience in SE Asia. The ability to enforce contract and property rights in the US, with ready access to the courts and relatively clear rules, sets the US apart in terms of business efficiency and predictability. In my assessment, it's a large part of what's made the US so prosperous. In contrast, dealing with corrupt officials in smaller countries in SE Asia is just wild.
- Popcicley 5y agoAccording to the International Labour Organization, there are more than 250 active cases around the world where crews are simply left to fend for themselves. It says 85 new cases were reported in 2020, which is twice as many as in the previous year. Now that's a sad piece of information I read today.
- sizzzzlerz 5y agoI'm not clear what Egypt's goal was by forcing this man to stay aboard the ship. Simply declaring him the guardian never made it so. He was never going to be able to resolve the issues himself and it appears the owners have simply abandoned it and written it off. If Egypt can't get money from the owners, then, as owners of the canal, deny other of their ships passage through it.
- shadowgovt 5y agoIt's real hard to tell as a non-Egyptian trying to Google enough case law to understand it, but the best I can figure is that the precedent is based upon the assumption that the ship's owner has interest in how the ship fares while the ship is arrested. Ostensibly, the requirement of custodianship should be protecting the interests of the owner... But since the owner could sue Egypt if their ship is damaged while it is kept in the country's care, Egypt mandates someone the owner designates stand watch. ... but, of course, that whole arrangement is predicated on the assumption the owner cares, at all, about the fate of the ship or its crew. Which is, perhaps, a philosophical throwback to a time when ships were the entire livelihood of a town and not assets that multinational corporations own hundreds of.
- gowld 5y agoIn a state without civil rights, a hair to the side of a dictatorship, people don't have civil rights.
- INTPenis 5y agoI don't understand what use he was on that ship? And can't they find any out of work person from shore to take his place? I'm sure there are dozens lining up to get that job for a few pennies an hour. And they might just have family in the area that can help sustain them.
- NullPrefix 5y agoYou seem to assume that Aisha was paid for those 4 years. I assume otherwise too, but I did not saw any contradicting evidence.
- INTPenis 5y agoThe article says he wasn't paid, at least part of the time. But what I'm saying is that this whole practice makes no sense. There must be people on shore who would be willing to be custodians of abandoned ships. That's a business idea, start an office offering ship custodians for shipping companies. When they get in trouble they can hire your custodian instead of stranding one of their own employees far from home.
- NullPrefix 5y agoThis business wouldn't work out, because you expect to be paid. Stranded employees get stranded because they are seen as expendables, ones that don't need to be paid.
- INTPenis 5y agoYeah sure it wouldn't work without a global change in policy too. Because right now shipping companies are just leaving their ships because of hardships, so to think they'd hire someone is silly. But with policy changes one can imagine a future where sailors prefer employers who have a contract with ship custodians before signing up with them, thereby voting with their employment.
- tracedddd 5y agoSo could anyone have saved this guy by delivering enough fuel to get to port? I wonder what the costs would have been.
- stingrae 5y agoyou would probably have to pay the port fees until it is moved as well.
- jandrese 5y agoThe original problem wasn't lack of fuel, it was inspection issues. They only ran out of fuel after being trapped and running the generators for electricity. In fact the ship probably still has a usable supply of bunker fuel on board so it wouldn't be that hard to get it to port, except that it is still trapped in the original legal limbo. After 4 years of deferred maintenance the engines are going to need some TLC before they can be fired up again. The longer the ship sits idle the worse the situation becomes. Left long enough and some fitting somewhere will corrode through or be damaged in a storm and without power to run the pumps the ship will start slowly sinking.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- biot 5y ago> "And I can't find a single person on this planet - and I've tried - to replace him." I’ll do it for $10M/year, paid in advance of course due to the company’s financial situation. Oh, he probably means for whatever meager wages they were paying this guy. Yeah, no wonder.
- quasarj 5y agoYou think he's getting paid?!
- NullPrefix 5y agoThe usual "We want to hire people but we can't find anyone ... willing to work for such wage"
- DanTheManPR 5y agoPer the article, he was unpaid. Literally just a prisoner.
- throwawaysea 5y agoThe saddest part of this unfair ordeal is that his mother died while he was confined to this ship, and he couldn’t go visit her or attend the funeral. This article notes, he contemplated suicide then. Shipping companies regularly do this to their crew, abandoning them when the costs of properly managing the situation aren’t worth it to them. Note that ship abandonment is also what led to the devastating explosion in Beirut, Lebanon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Rhosus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Rhosus
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoIf you are at the point where your family is dying, and you are contemplating suicide, the only rational choice is burn down the ship to smithereens and leave it at the bottomn of the ocean. Or rip it to bit and sell the parts.
- aasasd 5y agoNot to compare bad vs worse, but when I get bored for ten minutes I tend to remember that at least I'm not in Otokichi's crew: > The ship, without a mast or a rudder, was carried across the northern Pacific Ocean by currents. It drifted for 14 months, during which the crew lived on desalinated seawater and on the rice of their cargo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otokichi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otokichi (from a recent-ish HN thread).
- BurningFrog 5y agoOmnibus podcast episode: https://www.omnibusproject.com/324 https://www.omnibusproject.com/324
- lolc 5y agoFascinating story. It led me into a short Wikipedia bout reading about Japan's period of isolation.
- jzl 5y agoYou don't even need to go back that far. Just look at the story of Jose Alvarenga from a few years ago. He was adrift in the Pacific in a tiny fishing boat for the same amount of time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Salvador_Alvarenga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Salvador_Alvarenga https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/07/fisherman-lost-at-sea-436-days-book-extract https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/07/fisherman-lost...
- selimnairb 5y agoIf only he could have managed to get the ship wedged sideways in the Suez Canal. They would’ve helped him our real quick.
- dragonwriter 5y agoNo, they wouldn’t; heck, his case has gotten attention recently because the crew of the Ever Given has become similarly trapped, and his case has been held up as an example of what might happen to that crew if the dispute between the SCA, and the owners and operators of the Ever Given continues.
- jsmith45 5y ago> The Aman's owners, Tylos Shipping and Marine Services, told the BBC they had tried to help Mohammed but that their hands were tied. > "I can't force a judge to remove the legal guardianship," a representative told us. "And I can't find a single person on this planet - and I've tried - to replace him." Well, obviously nobody would volunteer unless things were going to change. But surely the ships operating company had violated their operating agreement, giving the owner grounds to "evict" them, find a new operator, get the updated safety equipment and classification certificates, and pay for the fuel. Once that was done surely the ship would be unseized, and with a new crew installed, Egypt ought to be happy to cancel the guardianship. This was all especially true back before it ran aground. It would also seem like this all would be very much in the owner's interest as letting the ship decay cannot be good for the ships value, and they probably were not getting paid rent by the current operator for this. But I'm guessing there is a lot more to this that the BBC article has left out.
- mrb 5y agoHis ship has been sitting still for so long that you can see it on Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/place/%D8%B3%D9%81%D9%8A%D9%86%D8%A9+%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%A8%D8%B7%D8%A7%D9%86+%D9%85%D8%AD%D9%85%D8%AF+%D8%B9%D8%A7%D8%A6%D8%B4%D8%A9+Mohammed+Aishah+Ship%E2%80%AD/@29.9446286,32.493548,301m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x14562f931826deb5:0xcc41675661426f9!8m2!3d29.9444682!4d32.4938089 https://www.google.com/maps/place/%D8%B3%D9%81%D9%8A%D9%86%D... Edit: a few more story details here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/19/ever-given-crew-fear-joining-ranks-of-seafarers-stranded-on-ships-for-years https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/19/ever-giv... When he rows to shore to get supplies he can only stay for two hours at most as the area is a restricted military zone. Other crew members were repatriated in September 2019, so Mohammad was not alone for 2 years but only for 7 months (which is no less unacceptable). The only reason Mohammad was allowed to leave was thanks to a local union representative who agreed to take his place as the ship’s guardian.
- Tempest1981 5y agoAnd Google Maps lists it as a "Shopping Mall"
- booi 5y agoit's where i go to buy despair.
- Fogest 5y agoSpeaking of the shopping, it actually makes me curious how he has funded buying the food/essentials he needs to survive. I wish that was covered in the story. 4 years is quite a long time, I am not sure how he would be affording it all. Makes me wonder if some kind of charity was helping him out or some local residences maybe. That also makes me wonder if he stayed on the ship all the time or if he also spent some nights with locals.
- pivo 5y agoIf you click on the ship, you can see a picture of him starting his swim back to the ship with provisions. Or at least I assume it's him.
- jonathanberger 5y agoI hope he is able to profit from his story with book and/or movie rights. It's a fascinating story and I bet would make a great movie a la Captain Phillips or 127 Hours.
- miguelmota 5y agoThe movie Life of Pi also comes to mind in regards to being stuck on a boat and retelling the story but Mohammed’s experience would make a great survival movie no doubt. Maybe Netflix will make a deal with him
- francoisp 5y agomaybe someone could have sent him a copy of this film? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Island_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Island_(film) A bit of hacking, some solar panels, a few stereos, tents, some poker chips, a rock band's visit... how long before the authorities would force him off? How many bitcoins would have he raked? (OK this is thinking different in a slightly hollywoodesque way... still) cheers!
- Ancapistani 5y agoIs there something that could be done by people otherwise uninvolved - like myself, or my fellow HN readers - to help the other ~250 people who are currently stuck in similar situations? I don’t even know how to go about enumerating who those people are, their ships, or where they are anchored. With that information a well-organized and/or funded group could at least get someone out to these people to check on them, provide basic supplies, and perhaps some form of reliable communications. A lot of problems seem insurmountable large and complex, and even this one seems so if your goal is to free these people of their legal liabilities - but if you set aside trying to solve the reason they’re stuck onboard these ships in the first place, providing basic humanitarian aid to them seems doable. ETA: This looks like a good place to start - https://www.ilo.org/dyn/seafarers/seafarersbrowse.home https://www.ilo.org/dyn/seafarers/seafarersbrowse.home
- BurningFrog 5y agoFrom reading the article, they just for some legal reason need a person on board the ship. So maybe people could volunteer to replace them on a rolling schedule.
- Ancapistani 5y agoIn this particular instance, that seems to be the case. I imagine there are probably legal hurdles that needed to be overcome to even make that happen, but I’m glad it did. I just sent an email to the International Maritime Organization, who manages the database I linked in the GP, to ask if there are any extant organizations dedicated to providing relief to people in similar situations. I’ll update here when and if I hear back from them, or as I make progress toward figuring out the scope of this issue in other ways.
- dawnerd 5y agoSounds like a joke but turning them into airbnb would probably end up being pretty popular. Who wouldn't want an entire ship to themself for a night?
- 5y ago
- xwdv 5y agoHow exactly was he able to eat for that long? What are the logistics of being stranded on a ship?
- jollybean 5y agoFolks - this is what we are outsourcing and externalizing. When foreign entities are able to bid for a lot less, and pay a lot less, a lot of it has to do with the fact that they will not bother with 'end of life' for ships, or getting insurance, or worrying about the lives of people who are 'expendable'. Those very nice buildings in Dubai come from some nasty labour practices. If every piece of this puzzle from end-to-end were to have happened in a 'rich country' there'd be legal issues, PR/media, litigation, and a separate kind of bureaucracy altogether, meaning the 'alternative' for a lot of corporations is just 'wash their hands' of it, pay 1/2 the price, and get all the ugly parts 'off the books'. We are to the point now where we have ample material surplus - we don't need any more 'plastic stuff from China' - it'd be worthwhile to start integrating a lot of 'off the books' stuff into trade deals. Ironically, it would be good for 'them' as well, because in chaotic, quasi-lawless systems it doesn't make sense for participants to invest in anything further ahead than what is in front of their noses (i.e. don't hate the Lebanese shippers for doing the only thing they can do to remain profitable, i.e. don't hate the player, hate the game) ... forcing some degree of transparency and accountability in these systems might raise prices a little bit, but the benefits would likely be immensely positive in the system overall. It's nice that the story is made personal, about a real individual (think: that Tom Hanks film about someone stuck in international airport limbo) but that's not really the story here is it.
- kevmo 5y agoNasty labour practices... It's just slavery. This poor gentleman was forced into slavery. You're right that this is what we're outsourcing. All of the corporate trade agreements - American manufacturing was shipped overseas, and American labor forced to compete with what is often a modern form of slave labor.
- markbnj 5y agoIf you're interested in shipping I highly recommend the YouTube channel of Chief Engineer Makoi https://www.youtube.com/c/ChiefMAKOi https://www.youtube.com/c/ChiefMAKOi. He has been talking about Mr. Aisha's situation for some time now. Really awesome to see that he's been relieved.
- wazoox 5y agoA friend of mine who's working on installing multimedia systems on luxury yacht told me a recent story today: a woman came from Florida to work on a yacht that was called by his owner to some place. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to her she had COVID. all of the 12 crew members went sick; the boat stopped at Malta, and 2 stewards died. As the ship was late and stranded, the owner simply fired all of the remaining people onboard, sick as they were, because he wanted his boat back. Then, the lady, stranded without resources in La Valette and probably under crushing guilt committed suicide. My friend knew several members of the crew.
- hiimdurex 5y agohello
- jopsen 5y agoWhat does legal guardian mean? What if you flee? And if your employer owes you a salary can you sell the ship for scrap to recover salary? -- I'm guessing suck tricks would require a fancy lawyer.
- dr_dshiv 5y agoHoly fuck
- vermontdevil 5y agoWhat is shocking is the number of active cases right now. 250 or so around the world. Wow.
- jakub_g 5y agoJust a few months ago, Beirut port blew up after a series of events that started with an abandoned ship. The way the world's maritime shipping system works is really screwed up. https://www.stableseas.org/blue-economy/explosion-beirut-seafarer-rights https://www.stableseas.org/blue-economy/explosion-beirut-sea...
- gowld 5y agoThe shipping companies are terrible, yes, but this is also a basic failure of Egyptian law, making the ship captain responsible for the ship.
- birktj 5y agoI don't get it. I might be misunderstanding things, but my understanding is that here in Norway the owner of a vessel has the ultimate responsibility in cases like these. Why is the Egyptian law this way? It doesn't seem very practical to legally require this one guy to stay on board, what problem is that supposed to solve?
- bluGill 5y agoWhat can Egypt do to the owner? The owners are not in Egypt.
- yawnxyz 5y agoWhat would happen if the ship "accidentally" started sinking, or if an explosion or other event of some sort happened to damage the ship?
- Scubabear68 5y agoWe
- failwhaleshark 5y agoJesus H. Worse than Catch-22.
- codeisawesome 5y agoEven more surprising that there’s one situation still ongoing: > Meanwhile, at the Iranian port of Assaluyeh, 19 mostly Indian crew members of the bulk carrier Ula are on hunger strike after their vessel was abandoned by its owners in July 2019.
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- huilo 5y agoSo, does he own the ship now?
- taycmoore2009 5y agoCan Someone ELI5?
- Ansil849 5y agoThis story is so appalling that I genuinely have a hard time understanding it. > He was legally obliged to stay aboard What the actual fuck? So Egypt has some sort of law, that allows the government to imprison people who have committed no crime indefinitely?
- Borrible 5y agoOh, he is not the only one. https://www.reuters.com/article/emirates-oil-tanker-int-idUSKBN2A91NS https://www.reuters.com/article/emirates-oil-tanker-int-idUS... Now, whose hell is hotter? This world is definitly a ship of damned and fools. https://jakeanddinoschapman.com/works/ship-of-fools/ https://jakeanddinoschapman.com/works/ship-of-fools/
- Hnrobert42 5y agoI started to write a comment about why international law doesn’t require ship owners to post a bond superior to other debt blah blah blah. Then I realized I am out of my element. I am like a child walking into the middle of a movie and wants to know what’s going on.
- ChoGGi 5y agoFour years stuck on a ship with no pay and lots of free time? I think I'd sell what I could for scrap, gotta got paid somehow.
- pibechorro 5y agoMARINER.. certainly not a sailor. Sailors use sails, its a dumb naming convention to call power boaters that.
- pacman2 5y agoI don't get it. 4 years without food an electricity? No Payment? What did he eat? "was able to swim ashore every few days". Ok, swim ashore, hitchhike to the next city, try to cross a border. Border to Israel looks tricky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93Israel_barrier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93Israel_barrier Worst case, go to Sudan or something. Apply for Asylum, get deported.
- new_ran779 5y agoJust why is this on HN?