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Tourists hit by falling ice shelf
09/08/2007 22:31 - (SA)
Oslo - Seventeen British tourists and a Russian sailor were injured, four of them seriously, when a cruise ship was hit by falling pieces of ice shelf in the Arctic, authorities said on Thursday.
Discover the World, a British travel company which had passengers on board, earlier said seven people had been injured, two of them seriously, in the accident which happened late on Wednesday afternoon.
The Russian-registered Aleksey Maryshev was carrying nearly 50 passengers and 19 crew when blocks of ice from the Horn glacier crashed into the water and onto the ship.
"It seems that this caused a huge wave and chunks of ice threw people on the ship against the walls," the Svalbard island's temporary governor Elisabeth Bjoerge Loevold told AFP.
All the tourists were British and almost all the crew members were from Russia, Jan Tommervold, Svalbard's deputy police chief, said by telephone.
The four seriously injured - three tourists and a Russian crew member - were taken to a hospital in the city of Tromsoe. The others underwent treatment at Svalbard's main town Longyearbyen.
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