Suspected drone attack on merchant ship off Gujarat coast; crew, vessel safe: Coast Guard
Mumbai, Dec 23: A suspected drone attack led to an explosion and a fire on a merchant ship with 21 Indians onboard off the Gujarat coast on Saturday morning, disrupting its power supply, Coast Guard sources said.
The 22-member crew and the vessel, Chem Pluto, are "safe", they said.
The ship was on its way to New Mangalore from Saudi Arabia, the sources said.
The fire has been extinguished and the ship's engineers are working to restore its electricity supply which got disrupted in the incident, they said.
Indian Coast Guard Ship Vikram, which was on Exclusive Economic Zone patrol, was diverted to the site, they said.
"The MRCC (Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre) Mumbai received an email from the ship's agent, Fleet Management, about a fire on board suspected due to a drone attack 217 nautical miles off Porbandar at around 10 am," said an official from the maritime security agency.
The vessel has 21 Indians, including the master, and a Nepali citizen, the official added.
"The crew could extinguish the fire and the engineers are working to restore electricity. The MRCC also diverted (merchant navy ship) MV Marlin which found that the crew was safe," the official said.
"We will be investigating if it was a drone attack," the official added.
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Over 17,000 people went missing in Delhi in 2024: NCRB
New Delhi (PTI): A total of 23,058 people, comprising 9,482 men and 13,576 women, were reported missing in Delhi in 2024, according to the latest National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).
Of the total, 5,491 were children below the age of 18 — 1,571 boys, 3,920 girls.
The city recorded 17,567 fresh adult missing persons cases in 2024, comprising 7,911 men and 9,656 women.
According to the NCRB data, released on Wednesday, 14,637 men, 18,238 women and six transgender persons were still missing from previous years.
At the latest count, in 2024, Delhi had a total of 55,939 missing persons cases — 24,119 men, 31,814 women and six transgender persons.
In 2024, police traced or collected 28,392 missing persons, including 12,182 men, 16,208 women and two transgender persons.
Only half of the men and half of the women who went missing could be traced.
A total of 27,547 missing persons – 11,937 men, 15,606 women, four transgender persons — were yet to be untraced by the end of the year, the data showed.
The data also revealed that 5,352 children from previous years remained untraced at the beginning of 2024.
The number of still missing boys was 1,621, and the number of missing girls was 3,729. Two transgender children were yet to be found.
After adding the pending cases from previous years, the total number of missing children cases handled in 2024 rose to 10,843.
The police traced or recovered 6,762 missing children — 2,030 boys, 4,732 girls.
The recovery rate stood at 63.6 per cent for boys and 61.9 per cent for girls, while no transgender child was traced.
By the end of 2024, a total of 4,081 children remained untraced, 1,162 of them boys, 2,917 girls, and two transgender children.
