But the wiki piece confirms the two men were 'disappeared', and Sweden had its knuckles rapped.
This handling was later condemned and found illegal by the Swedish Parliamentary Ombudsman. The United Nations Human Rights Committee found the deportation of Alzery a breach of Sweden's obligations under the international treaties that Sweden has entered into.
ibid
In the case of the so-called
Estonia 'disappeared' there remains a strong suspicion that the senior officers were survivors, that helicopter Y64 did take several to Huddinge hospital in the earliest hours after the accident, returning circa 05:00am with 'a doctor and a nurse from Huddinge Hospital' [JAIC]. However, why would Helicopter Y64 have gone to Huddinge at all in the first place unless to have dropped 'survivors' off? The nearest hospital to the scene of the accident, TYKS (Turku University Teaching Hospital) is a world renowned one with plenty of doctors and nurses ready to help. Early newspaper reports said Helicopter Y64 had a hero pilot who left the Stockholm base just after 2:00am - when at last Stockholm MRCC received the Mayday - and rescued eight or nine people. JAIC mysteriously leave out this early flight and has him arriving circa 5:00 with the medics from Huddinge, Stockholm, and rescuing just one person. The JAIC confabulate him with another helicopter rescuer to maintain the appearance he rescued about six in coalition. JAIC doesn't name any of the survivors associated with the helicopters or the ships, thus probably conscientiously keeping things vague and confusing.
An Interpol Warrant of arrest was put out for Piht, so the authorities certainly believed he had survived.
If none of these survived and the whole thing was a clerical error and a misreporting in the early day newspapers, that's a reasonable assumption. However, given the huge amount of publicity surrounding this issue, how come the JAIC did not offer one iota of explanation for it, given it didn't publish its report for three years. How difficult would it have been to insert a sentence to the effect, 'some senior crew and ship staff were listed as survivors but this was an error arising out of the chaos and confusion' ?
In addition, the two privately chartered US-registered cargo planes that left Arlanda Airport, Stockholm, the same time, with seven unnamed passengers and as paid for by the US Embassy in Stockholm, does appear, on the face of, it to be a 'disappearance' of the 'missing survivors' now presumed dead and would explain why the JAIC decided 'no-one is to blame for the accident'.
Compare and contrast with
The Herald of Free Enterprise or the
Jan Heweliusz, where several individuals and the ship owners were prosecuted for corporate manslaughter and gross negligence. Yet here we see the very sudden death of circa 1,000 civilians going about their every day lives, and all the JAIC can come up with is, 'It was a design fault in the bow visor locks', something that the well-respected shipbuilders strongly dispute, and whose car ferries were already built to the specifications as recommended by Justice Sheen after the
The Herald of Free Enterprise accident in 1987.
Estonia was built as
Viking Sally in 1984 and had the 'car ramp gate' - the bow visor - it had the margin waterline at well above the recommended 76mm, with its car deck at 2m above the waterline, it had lights to show the bridge when the car ramp and locks were open or shut, it had the HRU-activated automatically activated EPIRB's as soon as they were available (note how Asser Koivisto's report on the EPIRB's is missing from the JAIC archives and JAIC do not bother explaining their failure other than to say they were 'switched off'), so the claim, 'It was just like
The Herald of Free Enterprise accident', is misleading and misconceived.
It is clear that the whole thing has been covered up as a 'classified secret', hence the pathetic JAIC conclusion, as preordained on Day One by then PM Carl Bildt.
