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| Europe |
| 40 hurt as vessels collide off Istanbul |
| 2007-08-15 |
| A Turkish passenger ferry collided with a Ukrainian-flagged cargo ship off Turkey's biggest city Istanbul on Monday, injuring dozens of passengers, the city's health department said. "Forty people were taken for treatment to various hospitals," the department said in a statement. Ahmet Paksoy, the general director of the municipality-owned company that operates the ferry, told the NTV news channel that none of the injuries were serious. An investigation was launched to determine the cause of the accident in the Sea of Marmara, the Anatolia news agency said. The maritime undersecretariat in Ankara said in a statement that the passenger ferry had run into the cargo ship, the Semyon Rudhnev, which was anchored at the time. The ferry crashed head-on into the cargo ship about 20 minustes after it left the quay in Yenikapý, on the city's European side, en route to the island of Avþa, lying some 110 kilometres miles southwest of Istanbul. The Marmara Sea links to the Black Sea via the Bosporus Strait cutting through Istanbul, a city of 12 million people, and connects to the Aegean Sea through the Dardanelles Strait. The two straits constitute the main naval route for Ukrainian and Russian vessels to reach the Atlantic via the Mediterranean and are listed among the most crowded waterways of the world. Turkey's efforts to better regulate and limit the traffic through the Bosporus and Dardenalles over the years have come to naught because of the opposition of the countries that border the Black Sea, whose main trade route is the waterway. |
| Posted by:lotp |
| #2 Me. |
| Posted by: abu Magoo 2007-08-15 03:39 |
| #1 Running into an anchored ship? Who was at the helm? |
| Posted by: gromky 2007-08-15 03:12 |