MT Phoenix (1974)
ship built in 1974
MT Phoenix was a tanker which went aground in heavy seas at Sheffield Beach just north of Ballito near Durban, South Africa on the morning of 26 July 2011. The vessel was on its way to India to be scrapped when it ran aground. After three attempts, it was refloated, towed and then scuttled and sunk in 2,000 metres (6,600 ft) of water, about 80 kilometres (43 nmi) offshore of Amanzimtoti, south of Durban. The vessel was reportedly owned by either Suhair Khan of Dubai or Marika Investments, Lagos, Nigeria.
Ship history
After her grounding, the 8,000 ton 164 metre ship was identified as the former Fujitsuki Maru (IMO number: 7371123) built at the Shin Kurushima Dockyard in Hiroshima, Japan, in 1974. She was renamed several times; to Giray in 1983, Evrenye 1 (1998), Concel Pride (2004), Concep (2008), and finally to Phoenix in mid-2011.
Grounding
The vessel, under the flag of Equatorial Guinea and with an Indian crew, was under way to Alang, India, to be scrapped, when it suffered engine failure and almost drifted ashore near the Eastern Cape town of Hamburg. The salvage tug Smit Amandla had been despatched to tow it to Durban. The South African Maritime Safety Authority (SAMSA) contacted the owners who initially undertook to charter a tug to replace the Smit Amandla and complete the voyage to India. When communications broke down, SAMSA applied for a court order for the detention, seizure and sale of the uninsured vessel.
“MT Phoenix (1974)” enters the record as ship built in 1974. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Phoenix, ship and built can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6718999. Authority coordinates are -30.200, 31.420. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2011, 1974, 1983 and 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “MT Phoenix (1974)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.