Suez Canal: Owner of wedged container ship apologises

The Japanese owner of a container ship wedged in the Suez Canal has apologised for the “incident’.

The super-freighter is the size of four football fields and the incident has brought the vital waterway to a standstill. About 12% of global trade passes through the canal and older channels have been opened to try to deal with the backlog of traffic. It is thought that a gust of wind caused the ship to get stuck.

Haizam Amirah Fernández is a Senior Analyst at the Real Instituto Elcano, an international strategic studies think tank and he thinks this is a really exceptional situation in times of peace:

“A single ship can disrupt global trade and can affect countries’ supply chains and the lives of normal people – and the problem is we don’t know for how long this blockage will last because of the difficulties of moving such a huge ‘mega-container’ ship.”

Watch Euronews’ full report in the player above.