Sea and aerial drones hit the two ships at about 03:00 on Tuesday some 70 nautical miles east of Byala in Bulgaria’s exclusive economic zone, Prime Minister Rumen Radev said, and the Bulgarian ferry Dioscuria took off all 18 of the Able’s crew, 11 Turkish and seven Indian, two of them now in hospital in Varna, by the Euronews account of Wednesday. Both vessels are Turkish-owned by the Equasis register, the Alfa Watan sailed under Togo’s flag for Sulina, the Able carried wheat southward, and President Iliana Iotova convened the national security council on maritime security. The ten have no trace, the eighteen are in Varna, and the president in Ankara spoke of safety to the president in Moscow.
A day earlier a Turkish-owned ship carrying grain from Ukraine to Italy was hit off Romania and sank after a fire, killing two crew, and Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry said its captain, Azerbaijani national Rustam Hasanov, died and is being repatriated, that a second Azerbaijani, Mahammad Suleymanzade, is missing, and that three Azerbaijani sailors among the eleven rescued are under emergency care in Romania, by the same account. The ministry repeated its warning to citizens against work on vessels along contested maritime corridors.
The ten have no trace, the eighteen are in Varna, and the president in Ankara spoke of safety to the president in Moscow.
Erdoğan stressed the importance of efforts to ensure navigational safety in the Black Sea, said Ankara is ready to contribute to direct contacts between Russia and Ukraine, and congratulated Putin on his birthday and his party’s Duma result, in the directorate’s statement as Hürriyet Daily News carried it at 15:27. More than 200 civilian and commercial vessels have been attacked in the Black Sea since the war began, most of them this year, by the Chamber of Maritime Commerce’s count the paper cites, and Radev, who called the attack absolutely unacceptable, did not say who launched the drones.