The MV Arctic Sea Mystery Goes Mainstream

Early news reports, as covered previously here on ID, suggested MV Arctic Sea was potentially hijacked in the Baltic Sea on July 24th.

Now news reports are suggesting the ship may have been under pirate control when it passed through the Strait of Dover into the North Sea on July 28th.

The last reports say the ship has gone missing since turning off its AISLive ship tracking system off the coast of Brest, northern France, just before 1:30am on July 30.

Some good background here from the Telegraph, and a great nearly complete summary of events over at EagleSpeak.

The ship never passed through the Strait of Gibraltar, which is important since the ship was supposed to be going to Algeria. No one seems to know where the ship is. There are no reports of floating timber anywhere, which would suggest the ship has sunk. It is also interesting the Russian Navy and Federal Security Service are now searching for the ship.

Using the time line as reported by the press, I calculate the ships speed to be around 8 knots. If the ship has maintained 8 knots and is still at sea heading south off the west African coast, the ship should be somewhere near Conakry, Guinea or even off Siera Leone by now.

In wargames, this would play out as the scenario red team would exploit to launch an attack on a major offshore target.