A 59-year-old man was arrested on Tuesday on suspicion of manslaughter, the police in northern England said, after a container ship crashed into an oil tanker in the North Sea a day earlier, leaving one crew member missing and presumed dead.
The container ship, the Solong, struck the Stena Immaculate, an anchored oil tanker that was carrying jet fuel and was being operated by the U.S. Navy at the time, officials said. The episode happened off the coast of northeastern England on Monday morning, setting off a series of explosions and engulfing both vessels in flames.
One crew member from the Solong was missing, and an extensive search was called off on Monday night, Britain’s Coast Guard said. The rest of the crew members on both vessels were brought safely to shore.
The Humberside Police in England said in a statement that it had begun a criminal investigation into the cause of the crash. Craig Nicholson, the detective chief superintendent, said the department had subsequently “arrested a 59-year-old man on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter in connection with the collision.”
It was unclear what connection the arrested man had to either ship. In Britain, there are tight legal restrictions on what can be reported about a criminal case once an arrest has been made, aimed at protecting the accused person’s right to a fair trial. The police said they were still working to establish the full circumstances of the crash, but by Tuesday afternoon, a fuller picture of the chain of events had begun to emerge.
Mike Kane, Britain’s transport minister, told Parliament on Tuesday that the Stena Immaculate tanker had been anchored about 13 nautical miles off the coast of England near the mouth of the River Humber when it was struck.
“Whether there was foul play is, I think, speculation; there is no evidence to suggest that at the moment,” Mr. Kane said, adding that the British government was in touch with its American and Portuguese counterparts.
“Search-and-rescue operations for the missing sailor continued throughout yesterday, but were called off yesterday evening at the point at which the chances of their survival had, unfortunately, significantly diminished,” Mr. Kane said, adding, “Our working assumption is, very sadly, that the sailor is deceased.”
The tanker, owned by Crowley, a logistics company based in Florida, had been chartered on a short-term basis to serve U.S. government operations.
While the fire on the Stena Immaculate had been extinguished, the blaze continued on the Solong on Tuesday. Ernst Russ, a Hamburg-based shipping company that owns the Solong, said in a statement on Tuesday that it had not been carrying any sodium cyanide, despite initial reports that was the case.
Mr. Kane noted in his statement to Parliament that it was still working to determine what cargo had been on board the Solong but that “counter-pollution measures and assets are already in place, and both vessels are being closely monitored for structural integrity.”
A spokesman for Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, said the Marine Accident Investigation Branch will conduct the preliminary assessment of the crash and its cause.
Stephen Castle contributed reporting.
