On Thursday, a seven-year-old child and his mother went overboard on a ferry in the Baltic Sea. They could be rescued from the water after an hour – but now the police said both had died.
After a dramatic incident on a Baltic Sea ferry between Sweden and Poland, a child who fell into the water and his mother died. “Both the boy and the woman are no longer alive,” the spokesman for the Polish police told TVN24. In the early hours of the morning, information was received from the Swedish side that the terrible news had to be brought to the family. When the two were pulled out of the water, they still showed signs of life.
There were different reports as to how exactly the accident happened. The seven-year-old fell overboard on Thursday and the mother then jumped after him, said the head of rescue operations at the Swedish Maritime Authority.
Later, however, there was talk in the Polish media that both could have gone overboard at the same time: video surveillance material had been secured that did not confirm the version that a child had fallen overboard and an adult jumped after it, said a spokeswoman for the shipping company “Stena Line” the web portal of the Polish tabloid “Fakt”. The Swedish police were looking for passengers on the ferry who could report more about the course of the accident. The public prosecutor’s office in Gdańsk began investigations.
German Navy also involved in the operation
According to official information, mother and child were Polish citizens. The ferry “Stena Spirit” was therefore about halfway between Karlskrona in southern Sweden and Gdansk in Poland. According to eyewitness accounts, she quickly turned and a lifeboat was lowered into the water.
In addition to rescue helicopters and the ferry itself, NATO forces, who were in the area for an exercise, also took part in the search. After about an hour, the two were rescued from the water. The German Navy was also involved in the rescue operation, as a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Defense said in Berlin. The frigate “Mecklenburg-Vorpommern” with two helicopters on board drove to the scene of the accident, one of the helicopters took a person to a hospital.