A London court has sentenced Russian captain Vladimir Motin to six years’ imprisonment after finding him guilty of manslaughter by gross negligence over the March 2025 collision between the containership Solong and the anchored tanker Stena Immaculate off the Yorkshire coast. The crash ripped a huge hole in the tanker, ignited a jet‑fuel inferno and killed 38‑year‑old Filipino seafarer Mark Angelo Pernia, whose body has never been recovered. Justice Andrew Baker told Motin he had been “a serious accident waiting to happen” and that Pernia’s death was “wholly avoidable.” The judge said Motin’s failure to keep a proper lookout amounted to a “wholesale failure of his duty” over an extended period, and dismissed the captain’s explanation – that he had accidentally pressed the wrong button when attempting to disengage autopilot – as “extremely implausible” and “even worse” than the prosecution’s account. Prosecutors presented CCTV, voyage data recorder evidence and testimony showing the tanker was visible on the Solong’s radar for 36 minutes before impact. Motin did not summon assistance, sound alarms, slow the vessel or attempt a crash stop; jurors heard a long silence on the Solong’s bridge before the ship struck at 15.2 knots. The collision set both vessels ablaze and burned the Solong for eight days. Senior investigating officer Detective Chief Superintendent Craig Nicholson said Motin “completely failed in his duty” and had shown no remorse. In a victim impact statement read to the court, Pernia’s widow described the unfathomable loss to her young family; Pernia never met his second child, born two months after the tragedy. Investigators signalled that human failure in the form of complacency and poor bridge resource management- not equipment faults – lay at the heart of a catastrophe that might easily have claimed multiple lives and caused severe environmental damage. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1_95_0_1_2'); }); TagsSeafarers United Kingdom