Pakistani authorities are working to get 17 crew, suffering awful conditions in Egypt, repatriated.
The men, working on the Kuwaiti-flagged general cargo ship Akkaz, have been stranded in Egypt for the past four months with conditions onboard declining, supplies running out and four of them needing urgent medical attention. A YouTube video of their plight appeared over the weekend prompting the Pakistani government into action. The crew are also owed thousands of dollars in back pay. The ship is at anchor at the south entrance to the Suez Canal, according to MarineTraffic..
, have been stranded in Egypt for the past four months with conditions onboard declining, supplies running out and four of them needing urgent medical attention. A YouTube video of their plight appeared over the weekend prompting the Pakistani government into action. The crew are also owed thousands of dollars in back pay. The ship is at anchor at the south entrance to the Suez Canal, according to MarineTraffic..Shipping database Equasis lists the 10-year-old Akkaz as owned by North Star Shipping and managed by Afroned-Cargo Shipping from the Netherlands.
Cases of crew abandonment have spiked this year as the shipping downturn bit harder.
Reverend Ken Peters from the Mission to Seafarers blasted the rise in the incidents of abandonment as “an indictment on those substandard operators who bring the rest of the shipping industry into disrepute”.
“The human tragedy caused is desperate,” Peters told Splash in an interview earlier this year, adding: “The lack of food, water and fuel makes a ‘dead ship’ a health hazard and unfit for human habitation yet seafarers are caught as the victims, often of financial mismanagement and not of their own making.”
