Thousands of sheep drown as overladen ship sinks

• An overloaded ship carrying thousands of sheep sank Sunday in Sudan’s Red Sea port of Suakin.
• Most of the animals were drowned, but all of the crew were rescued.
• The sunken ship will have an impact on the port’s operations, an official said.

Officials claimed an overloaded ship stuffed with thousands of sheep sank Sunday in Sudan’s Red Sea port of Suakin, drowning most of the animals on board but rescuing all of the crew.

The livestock vessel was transporting animals from Sudan to Saudi Arabia when it sank after being loaded with thousands more animals than it was designed to carry.

“The ship, Badr 1, sank early Sunday morning,” a senior Sudanese port official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said. “It was transporting 15,800 sheep, which exceeded its load capacity.”

According to the official, the ship was only supposed to carry 9,000 sheep.

Another official expressed alarm about the accident’s economic and environmental consequences, despite the fact that all of the crew had been rescued.

“The sunken ship will have an impact on the port’s operations,” stated the official.

“It will almost certainly have an environmental impact due to the ship’s enormous quantity of animals dying.”

The ship took many hours to sink at the pier, according to Omar al-Khalifa, the head of the national exporters’ association, indicating that it “might have been rescued.”

The lost livestock is worth “approximately 14 million Saudi riyals, or almost four million dollars,” according to Saleh Selim, the association’s livestock division head, who also confirmed that the sheep were loaded onto the vessel in Suakin port.

Although plans to rehabilitate Suakin port have been made, a 2017 arrangement with Turkey to restore ancient structures and expand the docks was put on hold when longstanding president Omar al-Bashir was deposed.

Sudan is still suffering from a chronic economic crisis, which has worsened since army head Abdel Fattah al-Burhan conducted a military coup last year.

The military coup provoked retaliatory measures from Western governments, including funding cuts, in exchange for the restoration of the transitional government set up after Bashir was deposed.