Vietnamese border guards in central Quang Ngai Province have temporarily detained two foreign ships with Chinese sailors on board for violating the country’s sea territory, local authorities reported.

At 9 am Tuesday, the Border Guard Station at Sa Ky Port reported that it had caught two foreign cargo ships illegally anchoring more than two nautical miles off the province’s Co Luy.

By appearing in this area, the ships had violated Vietnam’s territorial waters, the station said. 

The two ships have number codes MOMENTUM 25001 and MOMENTUM 25002 and bear Sierra Leonean and Indonesian nationalities, respectively.   Each ship has a crew of nine, and of the 18 sailors, 12 are Indonesian and six are Chinese. The ships’ captains told the border guards that they were sailing from Shanghai to Indonesia. On the way, due to bad weather and a shortage of food, they decided to drift their ships. On June 10, they said, when the ships were drifting through the area, they faced violent waves, so the captains decided to anchor them without reporting to Vietnamese authorities. Border guards and customs officers at Sa Ky Port reported the ships, detained the lists of crew members and their passports, and asked the captains and chief mechanics of the ships to sign the reports. The border guard station and the port customs force will continue to investigate the actions of the ship crews before handling them in accordance with the applicable laws of Vietnam.