Four naval officers facing action for warship-boat collision

New Delhi: The Navy is initiating disciplinary action against four officers and two sailors found culpable by a Board of Inquiry for collision between warship INS Talwar and a fishing vessel in December last year, Rajya Sabha was informed today. “The Board of Inquiry (BoI) instituted by Navy has held four officers and two sailors culpable and disciplinary action is being initiated against them,” Defence Minister Arun Jaitley said in written reply to a query. [caption id=“attachment_1619975” align=“alignnone” width=“300”]  Representational image. Image courtesy PIB[/caption] The minister said the collision incident on 23 December last year “has been attributed to both inadequate lookout and non-adherence of standard norms of outboard lighting by the fishing boat as well as error in judgement by the naval ship’s crew, at night”. In the incident, INS Talwar was carrying out night operations off the coast of Ratnagiri in Maharashtra when it collided with a fishing trawler resulting in the drowning of the boat. The incident was part of the spate of incidents which led to the resignation of Admiral DK Joshi as Chief of Naval Staff on 26 February. Answering another query on the fire incident on board INS Sindhuratna in which two officers were killed, Jaitley said, “BoI was instituted and its report is under examination at Naval Headquarters from professional and technical angle.” The minister said the Navy headquarters was also going through the BoI reports into ingress of water into warship INS Vipul in January. PTI