The Korean Supreme Court has released on bail the captain and the first officer of a super tanker arrested for allegedly causing damage to the environment.
The Korean Supreme Court has released on bail the captain and the first officer of a super tanker arrested for allegedly causing damage to the environment after the tanker spilled oil into the sea. The tanker, mv Hebei Spirit, belonged to V Ships India Pvt Ltd, Mumbai.
The court released Captain Jasprit Chawla and first officer Syam Chetan on Wednesday on a bail of $7,500 each.
The court said it took into account the “special characteristics” of the case and international opinion before granting bail to the two, even though public sentiment against the spill is very high in Korea. The court, however, said that the officers cannot leave Korea. The families of the officers were in Korea for the bail hearing.
“More efforts are needed to get the boys discharged honourably and bring them home,” Capt Vaibhav Dalvi, GM, operations, V Ships, said.
Chawla and Chetan were acquitted by a trial court, Capt Rajesh Tandon, MD, V ships, said. But the Korean High Court overturned the judgment in June 2008 and sentenced Chawla to 18 months in jail and Chetan to eight months in jail, he said.
“The entire shipping world agreed that the officers’ conduct in containing the spill was exemplary,” Tandon said. “Their quick response prevented a disaster of the magnitude of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska a few years ago,” he said.
A fully-loaded MV Hebei Spirit was anchored off Taean, outside the port of Daesan in the Republic of Korea on December 6, 2007. Around 7 am the next day, the rope from a tug towing a crane barge owned by Samsung broke. The crane barge went adrift and rammed into mv Hebei Spirit, causing the oil spill. Over 10,000 tonnes of the 260,000 tonnes of oil the tanker carried spilled into the sea.
“This is for the first time in maritime history that an anchored vessel has been held responsible for an oil spill,” Dalvi said.
“Seventy per cent of the spill occurred almost immediately after the barge crashed into the tanker and could not be contained,” Rustom Cassinath, secretary of Foreign Owners Representatives and Ship Managers Association, said. The spill was completely cleaned up but the damage to environment resulted in loss of livelihood for 5,000 fishermen. It also drastically affected the marine ecology in the area.
Korea has demanded damages of $450 million. After Chawla and Chetan were arrested, the Indian Seafarers Association (ISA) had resolved “to boycott South Korean waters even if employed by foreign flagships”.
The Indian Docks, Railways and Civil Aviation workers have shown solidarity with the ISA. International Transport Workers Federation had also protested against the arrests outside the South Korean Embassy in London.
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