Rescue workers from Germany have decided to stop looking for four crew members who are lost from a British ship that sank in the North Sea on Tuesday morning.
The Verity crashed into a bigger boat called the Bahamian Polesie near the German shore.
The rescue service said they stopped looking for survivors on Tuesday night and won’t start again.
Two out of the seven crew members on the British-flagged ship were saved.
They found another person’s body in the water, about 22km (13 miles) southwest of Heligoland. Heligoland is a group of islands that belongs to the state of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany.
The Verity ship was traveling to the UK, carrying steel from a city called Bremen in Germany to a place called Immingham in Lincolnshire. The collision happened around 5:00 AM on Tuesday between the Verity ship and another ship called Polesie. The Polesie ship had departed from Hamburg in Germany and was heading to La Coruña in Spain.
No one on the Polesie ship got injured. We don’t know yet why the crash happened.
Two boats and a helicopter from Germany helped in the search, according to the rescue service.
Rescue divers tried to find any signs of life in the wreck, but they had a hard time because of challenging conditions.
The German Central Command for Maritime Emergencies said that the situation around the wreck was very challenging. The visibility was only one to two meters, and the strong currents made it difficult for the rescue team to carry out their work. Eventually, the rescue efforts had to be stopped.
Passengers were told at about 5:30 AM local time that the ship was assisting in the search. The company told ITV that the Iona had done what it was supposed to according to “international and moral law”.
The Iona ship, which started its trip from Southampton on Saturday and was going to Hamburg, Rotterdam, and Bruges, was allowed to continue its journey.
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Search for four missing British ship members called off by German rescue workers
