The ship is currently located off the coast of Norway, but is reported to be heading past Denmark and Sweden on its way to Lithuania. According to websites that follow maritime traffic, the ship is listed as "not under command", and is being towed slowly southeast with the help of a tugboat.
It is unclear where the ship will end up, whether it will be Norway, Denmark or the Baltic Sea. We will have to come back to that, says Mattias Lindholm, press spokesperson at the Coast Guard.
What we know now is that they have not requested a port of refuge, at least not in Sweden.
However, the ship is not allowed to pass through the Öresund Strait between Helsingborg and Helsingör, reports Expressen. The reason is that the maximum allowed draft for ships is approximately seven meters.
The ship is at ten meters, which means it cannot go here, says Patrik Selind, a pilot operator at the Pilotage Central in Malmö, to the newspaper.
"On high alert"
TT has also been in contact with the Transport Agency, MSB, and the county administrative boards in Västra Götaland and Kalmar, two of the affected counties. All are following the developments.
The ship MV Ruby has 20,000 tons of ammonium nitrate on board. It is a hazardous chemical that, among other things, was behind the massive explosion in Beirut's harbor in Lebanon in 2020 – but then in much smaller quantities.
Jonas Grevstad, head of the Coast Guard in Gothenburg, believes that it was entirely different circumstances back then.
In Beirut, it had been lying there for years and became unstable, and a fire also broke out in the area, he says to GP.
There is currently no indication that the ship poses an immediate security risk.
The damage and connections to Russia make us raise an eyebrow. We have done so and have put our emergency response functions on high alert, says Grevstad to GP.
Common transport
The cargo is classified as hazardous goods, but the risk of detonation or ignition is "very low", according to Lindholm at the Coast Guard, who emphasizes that the substance is transported daily by land, sea, and rail in Sweden.
The ship MV Ruby was loaded in a Russian port on the Kola Peninsula and suffered hull damage. However, it is not welcome at its final destination in Lithuania. When the ship temporarily anchored in Norwegian Tromsö, the authorities established a 500-meter security zone. It was determined that the damage needed to be repaired, but it was not "desirable" in densely populated Tromsö, reports Aftonbladet.
According to the Danish Dagbladet Information, the ship is from Malta, owned by a Syrian via a holding company in Lebanon.
Ammonium nitrate is produced from ammonia and nitric acid. It is not an explosive in itself, but can, under certain circumstances, be brought to explosion. If it is mixed with oil and aluminum powder, one gets an explosive.
Ammonium nitrate is used for fertilizers, but has also been used to manufacture bombs in several attacks around the world – including in Oklahoma in 1995 and in Bali in 2002.
The Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik used the substance for the bomb that detonated outside the government quarter in Oslo in 2011, and it was also used in the suicide bombing in Stockholm in 2010.
In 2020, over 200 people were killed and several thousand injured in a massive explosion in Beirut's harbor. It was caused by 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, which had been stored in the harbor for over six years without adequate safety measures.
