Italy's coastguard said Wednesday it had narrowly averted a catastrophe by intercepting a runaway freighter that was on a collision course with the country's rocky shoreline with 768 people on board. In the second major maritime drama of recent days, officers revealed that the huge cargo ship's engine had been locked on with the steering set on a direction that would have led to it crashing ashore in the Puglia region on the "heel" of Italy.
The coastguard, already working flat out because of the Norman Atlantic ferry disaster, scrambled two helicopters overnight after realising that the Moldovan-registered Blue Sky M, was headed for the rocks. Six officers boarded the vessel and, after some frantic moments on the bridge, were able to unlock the engines and bring the boat under control just five miles (eight kilometres) from the coast.
"It was a real race against the clock," coastguard spokesman Filippo Marini said. "Unlocking the engines was a difficult and delicate operation, but they managed to do it." In a tweet from its official account, the coastguard said a "massacre" had been avoided. The coastguard later put the number of migrants on board at 768, revising downwards their earlier estimates of more than 900. The migrants were said by local officials to be almost all Syrians and their number included a heavily pregnant woman whose waters broke during the drama and some 40 children.
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