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Collision sinks historic German ship after months-long costly renovation

A collision between a vintage sailing ship and a container vessel in Germany injured five people and sunk the wooden ship which had just been restored at a cost of €1.5 million ($1.7 million), police said.

Published: 9 June 2019 12:55 CEST

Collision sinks historic German ship after months-long costly renovation

Photo: Bodo Marks/DPA

The 43 passengers and crew aboard the “No 5 Elbe” were rescued after it was in collision with the Cyprus-flagged container ship Astrosprinter on the Elbe River at Stade near Hamburg around 12:30pm on Saturday.

The 37 metre (121 foot) long pilot schooner, built in 1883, was Hamburg's last remaining seagoing ship from the era of wooden ships and could be rented for harbour excursions, media reports said.

The ship had just been renovated over eight months in a Danish shipyard where it received new outer wooden planks and a new stern, the DPA news agency said.

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France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

More than 200,000 Algerians fought with the French army in the war that pitted Algerian independence fighters against their French colonial masters from 1954 to 1962.

At the end of the war, the French government left the loyalist fighters known as Harkis to fend for themselves, despite earlier promises it would look after them.

Trapped in Algeria, many were massacred as the new authorities took revenge.

Thousands of others who fled to France were held in camps, often with their families, in deplorable conditions that an AFP investigation recently found led to the deaths of dozens of children, most of them babies.

READ ALSO Who are the Harkis and why are they still a sore subject in France?

French President Emmanuel Macron in 2021 asked for “forgiveness” on behalf of his country for abandoning the Harkis and their families after independence.

The following year, a law was passed to recognise the state’s responsibility for the “indignity of the hosting and living conditions on its territory”, which caused “exclusion, suffering and lasting trauma”, and recognised the right to reparations for those who had lived in 89 of the internment camps.

But following a new report, 45 new sites – including military camps, slums and shacks – were added on Monday to that list of places the Harkis and their relatives were forced to live, the government said.

Now “up to 14,000 (more) people could receive compensation after transiting through one of these structures,” it said, signalling possible reparations for both the Harkis and their descendants.

Secretary of state Patricia Miralles said the decision hoped to “make amends for a new injustice, including in regions where until now the prejudices suffered by the Harkis living there were not recognised”.

Macron has spoken out on a number of France’s unresolved colonial legacies, including nuclear testing in Polynesia, its role in the Rwandan genocide and war crimes in Algeria.

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