Helicopters scour Caspian for survivors

Passengers' relatives wait for news in a Baku hospital

Helicopters have resumed the search for survivors from a ship which capsized in the Caspian Sea off the coast of Azerbaijan on Tuesday.

I have no information at all and there is nobody who can help me. They do not know anything

Bugar Guseinov
Brother of missing man

The Mercury II was carrying 51 passengers and crew and about 1,000 tonnes of crude oil en route from Aktau in Kazakhstan to the Azeri capital, Baku.

Forty-one people are still missing and hopes for their recovery are fading.

So far rescuers have found just nine survivors and recovered one body.

Rescue efforts, hampered by high winds and driving rain, carried on through the night with five vessels searching for survivors.

Relatives were desperate for information

They were joined at dawn by six helicopters, which had been forced by darkness to stop their search overnight.

But there was thought to be virtually no chance that anyone else could have survived a night in the chilly waters.

"A tragedy has occurred. More than 40 people have died," Azerbaijan's interior minister, Ramil Usubov, said on Wednesday.

The ship went down in a storm on Tuesday morning after issuing a distress signal.

Some newspapers in Azerbaijan are reporting the ship sank because it was overloaded.

There are now fears the oil on board the ship could cause an ecological disaster if it leaked into the Caspian Sea.

But Natik Aliev, the head of Azerbaijan's state oil company which has said it will carry out a clean-up operation, said only a small slick had been found.

He said it was most likely to have been engine oil from the Mercury's tanks.

On Tuesday, frantic relatives gathered outside the Caspar office and the hospital to which the rescued people were taken, desperately seeking information.

"My brother works on the ferry as a senior mechanic. I have no information at all and there is nobody who can help me. They do not know anything," said Bugar Guseinov.

Winds and waves

Aydin Bashirov, president of the Caspar shipping company, said 43 of those on board were crew members, and eight were passengers.

Mr Bashirov said the boat got caught in a storm in which winds of up to 65 mph (105 km/h) whipped the sea into six-metre (20 foot) waves.

He said the heavy seas caused oil containers on board the ship to shift to one side, and the boat to sink.

The President of Azerbaijan, Geidar Aliev, has set up a commission to investigate the cause of the tragedy.

The sinking is the second sea disaster to hit Azerbaijan's shipping industry this year.

In July, six men died after their Azerbaijani tanker ship exploded in the Turkmenistan port of Turkmenbashi.