CAIRO, Jan 9 (Portal) – Shipping traffic in the Suez Canal continued as normal on Monday after tugboats towed a cargo ship that became stranded during its passage through the waterway, the canal authority said.
The glitch was expected to cause only minor delays as ship convoys would resume regular transit by 11:00 a.m. local time (09:00 GMT), ship’s agent Leth said.
The M/V Glory, which was sailing to China, suffered a technical failure while 38 km in its passage south through the canal before being towed by four tugs to a repair area, the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) said in a statement .
The Suez Canal is one of the busiest waterways in the world and the shortest shipping route between Europe and Asia.
In 2021, a huge container ship, the Ever Given, got stuck on a southern stretch of the canal in high winds, blocking traffic for six days before it was able to break free.
M/V Glory is a Marshall Islands-flagged bulk carrier, data from tracker VesselFinder and MarineTraffic has shown.
It left Ukraine’s port of Chornomorsk for China on December 25 with 65,970 tons of corn, according to the Istanbul-based Joint Coordination Center (JCC), which oversees Ukraine’s grain exports.
The JCC, which includes representatives from the United Nations, Turkey, Ukraine and Russia, said the ship was cleared to proceed from Istanbul after an inspection on January 3.
Reporting by Yusri Mohamed, Amal Abbas, Florence Tan, Alaa Swilam, Mahmoud Mourad, Jonathan Spicer; writing by Nadine Awadalla, Henriette Chacar and Aidan Lewis; Adaptation by Himani Sarkar and Jason Neely
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