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A British cargo ship has sunk in the North Sea after a collision early on Tuesday, according to German authorities.
Nine ships and search aircraft, including a German Navy helicopter and a P&O cruise liner, are scouring the sea for the missing crew.
Two survivors have been rescued and are receiving medical treatment. A third has died. His body was recovered shortly before noon. Four sailors are still unaccounted for.
“The emergency services are doing everything they can to rescue the missing people,” said German transport minister Volker Wissing. “My thoughts are with the crew members, their relatives and the rescue teams who have been in action since early this morning.”
The 91-metre vessel Verity, a bulk carrier, collided with the larger freighter Polesie at 5am in the German Bight, the shallow south-eastern part of the North Sea, 12 nautical miles south-west of the German island of Heligoland, Germany’s Central Command for Maritime Emergencies (CCME) said.
The Verity, a British-flagged ship built in 2001, was en route from Bremen in Germany to Immingham, on the Humber estuary in north-east England.
“[We] currently assume that the Verity sank as a result of the collision,” said CCME, which is based in the north German port town of Cuxhaven, not far from the scene of the accident.
Two emergency sea rescue cruisers, the Hermann Marwede and the Bernhard Gruben, are co-ordinating the search in the area.
A number of emergency response ships and commercial vessels have joined the rescue operation as the search for the missing has become more desperate.
Among them is the P&O cruise liner Iona, a 344-metre vessel with room for 7,000 crew and passengers, which departed from Southhampton at the weekend for a tour of the North Sea coast.
Doctors and medical staff on board the liner have been told to prepare to receive casualties.
Although the North Sea water temperature is unseasonably high at the moment — measured at about 15C off the Dutch coast on Tuesday — it is still cold enough to cause hypothermia after only a couple of hours of exposure without adequate protection.
The two rescued crew members have been transferred by helicopter to hospitals in Germany, where they are receiving urgent medical care.
Conditions in the area on Tuesday morning were rough but navigable, with waves of up to 3m and winds of up to 50km an hour.
The Polesie, which at 190 metres is more than twice the size of the Verity, is still buoyant. The vessel has a crew of 22 people. It was on its way from Hamburg to Coruna in Spain.
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