The Equatorial Guinean-flagged Xelo was sailing from the Egyptian port of Damietta to Malta when it requested entry into Tunisian waters on Friday night due to bad weather. “The ship sank this morning in Tunisian territorial waters. “At the moment there is no leak,” said Mohamed Carey, a spokesman for the local court. A disaster prevention committee will meet in the next few hours “to decide on the measures to be taken,” he added. The tanker is 58 meters (190 feet) long and nine meters wide, according to the ship tracking website, shiptracker.com. It began to draw water about seven kilometers (four miles) from the sea in the Gulf of Gabes and the engine room sank, according to a statement from the Tunisian Ministry of Environment. He said the Tunisian authorities had evacuated the seven-member crew. Environment Minister Leila Chikhaoui was traveling to Gabes “to assess the situation… and take the necessary precautionary decisions in coordination with regional authorities,” the ministry said. Authorities had launched a “national contingency plan to prevent marine pollution in order to bring the situation under control and prevent the spread of pollutants”. Carey said that the Georgian captain, four Turks and two Azerbaijanis were briefly hospitalized for check-ups and are now in a hotel. The Ministries of Defense, Interior, Transport and Customs are working to prevent “a marine environmental disaster in the region and to reduce its impact,” the environment ministry said. Before the ship sank, he described the situation as “worrying” but “under control”. The Gulf of Gabes has traditionally been a fishing area, but activists say it has suffered from pollution from the phosphate-processing industries based near the city of Gabes. The last maritime accident with the country was in October 2018, when the Tunisian truck Ulysse crashed in Virginia, based in Cyprus, anchored about 30 kilometers from the northern tip of Corsica, launching hundreds of tons of fuel in the Mediterranean. It took several days of sea maneuvering to disengage the boats and pump about 520 cubic meters (18,365 cubic feet) of propulsion fuel that had escaped from the tanks.
