A ship carrying more than 3,000 tonnes of rice from India sank near the outer anchorage of Bangladesh's Chittagong port on Wednesday, port officials said. They said the Singapore-flagged vessel Badulu Valley was in collision with an empty, anchored Chinese oil tanker called Heng Zhou, and sank in the Bay of Bengal during the afternoon.
Port officials had earlier given the name of the vessel as M.V. Batulu but the agent for the Singapore-flagged ship later corrected this. "The ship sank in the bay with its 17 crew on board," a port official said. Tugboats from the port authority and the Bangladesh Navy rescued 16 crew members, he said, but the fate of the remaining member was unknown.
The crew comprised nationals from Myanmar and India, officials said. The sea was choppy at the time of the accident because of strong monsoon winds.