More than eight months after it was involved in a severe oil spill in the Caribbean, the tug Solo Creed has been arrested in Angola as part of massive $244m clean-up costs tallied by the government of Trinidad and Tobago. On the morning of February 7, local authorities detected an oil slick spewing from a capsized vessel off the west coast of Tobago. The slick quickly hit the southwest shoreline of the Caribbean island with a national emergency declared. The tug and the barge involved were eventually identified as the Solo Creed and the Gulfstream, both having a history of towing Venezuelan oil. The barge’s final, fateful voyage saw it take some 35,000 barrels of oil on a voyage that was meant to end in Guyana, but along the way, the barge ran into difficulties. After the 48-year-old barge capsized off the coast of Tobago, the oil slick spread hundreds of kilometres west and reached the east coast of the Dutch Caribbean island of Bonaire and later Aruba and Grenada. In an exclusive investigation by the Trinidad & Tobago Guardian and Bellingcat, a Dutch journalism group, the Solo Creed was located earlier this year thousands of kilometres away. It turns out that the tug was arrested on May 11 in Angola for an unauthorised breach of the African nation’s claimed offshore oil security perimeter of oil extraction blocks 17 and 18. It has subsequently just been arrested by Trinidad and Tobago. “We will take all steps to hold the owners and or persons interested in the vessel accountable for the extensive damage caused to the livelihood of the people and environment of Tobago,” Trinidad and Tobago’s Ministry of Energy and Energy Industries stated in a release yesterday. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1_95_0_1_2'); }); TagsTrinidad and Tobago