Russian captain guilty of North Sea tanker crash death | UK | News

A sea captain has been found guilty of murdering a crew member after his ship crashed into an oil tanker off the Yorkshire coast.

Russian Vladimir Motin was on lonely watch when the Solong collided with the Stena Immaculate, anchored near the Humber Estuary, at 9.47am last March 10.

Mark Angelo Pernia, 38, who was working on Solong’s bow, died instantly in the fire, but his body was never found.

The Filipino family man had a five-year-old child at the time of the crash, but he never met his second child, who was born two months after his death.

Following the Old Bailey trial, the jury deliberated for eight hours to find Motin, 59, from St Petersburg, guilty of manslaughter by gross negligence.

Motin appeared emotionless as he heard the jury’s verdict on Monday and was taken into custody for sentencing on Thursday.

Prosecutor Tom Little KC told jurors that Mr Pernia’s wife was about seven months pregnant at the time of her death.

He said he lives in a remote part of the Philippines and had to make arrangements to travel to a place with good internet access to watch the criminal proceedings.

Detective Superintendent Craig Nicholson told the Press Association it was “a simple, senseless tragedy”.

He said: “It’s a miracle there weren’t more deaths or serious injuries.

“Similarly, this could have been a huge environmental disaster. Solong burned for eight days following the impact.

“There were people on board Stena Immaculate at the time of the collision. One of the crew members was changing the light fixture at the top of the mast.”

The court had previously heard that the Solong, which was 130 meters long and weighed 7,852 gross tonnes, set sail from Grangemouth, Scotland, towards the Dutch port of Rotterdam at 9.05pm on March 9.

With its crew of 14 people, it was carrying mainly alcoholic beverages and some dangerous goods, including empty but dirty sodium cyanide containers.

Stena Immaculate, with a crew of 23, was 183.2 meters long and transported more than 220,000 barrels of JetA1 high-quality aviation fuel from Greece to the UK.

The danger in the event of a collision was obvious, jurors were told, as both ships were loaded with flammable cargo.

Motin was allegedly responsible for many failures in the lead up to the tragedy and then lied about what happened on the bridge.

The prosecution said Stena Immaculate appeared on Solong’s radar screen 36 minutes before the collision, but Motin did nothing to move away from the collision course.

The prosecutor’s office said he did not call for help, slow down, sound the alarm to warn the crews of either ship or encourage the collision to be stopped as a last resort.

Dramatic CCTV footage captured the moment both ships were destroyed in a massive fire due to fuel leaking from the Stena Immaculate.

The shocked crew of the US tanker reacted immediately, saying: “Damn… what just hit us… a container ship… this is not a drill, this is not a drill, fire fire fire, we had a collision.”

Jurors heard a long silence before the Solong bridge crashed into the oil tanker at 15.2 knots. A full minute passed before Motin was heard to react.

Motin and the remaining Solong crew abandoned ship and were put ashore at Grimsby, where the defendant sent a message to his wife saying he would be “guilty”.

In his defense, Motin denied sleeping or leaving his post on the bridge.

He told jurors that when he saw Stena Immaculate was right in front of us, he gave up taking action because it was moving slowly but unpredictably.

He then made a “mistake” and pressed the wrong button when trying to take Solong off autopilot and steer it a nautical mile away.

Without realizing the mistake, he told jurors that Solong stopped and restarted the steering with no consequences, thinking he might have developed a steering malfunction experienced on sister ship Sanskip Express.

Motin said he did not order a combat stop because he feared the Solong would collide with the accommodation block, killing the American tanker crew.

He told jurors: “I thought the stopping distance was not enough. If I went to layover I would be endangering the lives of the American crew.”

The prosecution argued that Motin lied about what happened in Russia to “get back to his wife” and gave different statements to police and jurors.

Prosecutor Julia Faure Walker told jurors: “It was abundantly clear to him that he had pressed the wrong button and, if that was the case, how he could fix it.

“The truth is that he did nothing to prevent the collision. Instead he encountered a problem that had never occurred before at Solong.

“There were no mechanical or electronic problems on Solong. The rudder was working. The only thing that was not working on March 10, 2025 was the man on the dock.”

He said jurors might conclude that Motin had a “lax attitude” and “thought he knew better than everyone else.”

He pointed out the fact that Solong had turned off the bridge navigation monitoring alert system (BNWAS), which was designed to ensure that someone was physically alert on the bridge.

The prosecution said their failures were “extremely bad, amounting to gross negligence”.

Following the verdict, Michael Gregory of the Crown Prosecution Service said: “This was a tragic and entirely preventable death of a crew member caused by truly, extraordinarily bad negligence.

“Mark Pernia was just going about his day job.

“The fact that his body was not found is a source of great sadness for his family.

“Vladimir Motin was an experienced ship captain who had captained the Solong for 15 years, but his behavior on this occasion fell well below expected standards.

“It’s extremely fortunate that no one else died.”