Latvia's coast guard started evacuating a stranded cruise ship with nearly 1,000 people on board after tug boats failed to pull the luxury liner off an underwater sand bank in the Baltic Sea.
The 651 passengers, most of them elderly Germans, were being transferred from the Mona Lisa onto two naval ships, which would take them to Ventspils, a port city in northeastern Latvia, the coast guard said. The passengers were descending ladders from the liner to the naval ship, it said. Rescuers also planned to remove most of the 327 crew members and six crew interns from the ship, which ran aground early on Sunday about 17 kilometres off Latvia's coast. "The operation is proceeding smoothly and the passengers are fine," coast guard officer Ruslans Kulesovs told, adding that the weather conditions were "nearly perfect." Officials could not say how long the evacuation would take, nor could they specify how many crew would remain on board the Bahamas-registered vessel. The Mona Lisa's captain agreed to evacuate the ship after unsuccessful efforts to free it from the sand bank. The 201-metre-long Mona Lisa was on its way from Kiel, Germany, to Riga with 984 people on board when it ran aground, officials said.
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