Eight Filipino crew members have been confirmed safe and are lodging at a hotel in the United Arab Emirates after a fatal maritime incident struck their tanker at the Dubai Delta Anchorage, the Department of Migrant Workers (DMW) said, with all eight having already reached out to relatives back home.
The reassurance came alongside word that one of their countrymen aboard the vessel did not survive. The Filipino was one of nine overseas workers on a crew of 13 serving the Gibraltar-flagged M/V Hercules Star, according to the DMW, which cited the account of the licensed manning agency handling the deployment.
Government support for the dead worker’s household will not lapse, the agency pledged, pointing to a standing order from President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. that affected seafarers and their families be given whatever help they need. DMW Officer-in-Charge Bernard P. Olalia and Undersecretary Felicitas Q. Bay passed on the administration’s sympathies to the grieving relatives and committed to sustained aid.
To carry that out, the DMW said it is working through several channels at once — the manning agency, the vessel’s principal, Philippine Foreign Service Posts abroad, and authorities in the UAE — both to safeguard the surviving Filipinos and to organize their return home in orderly fashion.
The circumstances of the death remain unsettled. Peninsula, the company that chartered the tanker, confirmed a single fatality in a statement but stopped short of explaining how it happened, saying only that it was deeply saddened to report the loss. The charterer added that a specialist team had been dispatched to search for a crew member still unaccounted for, while everyone else aboard had been located.
What hit the anchored tanker has drawn differing early reads. Maritime security sources cited by Reuters raised the possibility of a drone strike, though Peninsula itself has not confirmed any attack. The UK Maritime Trade Operations, a body linked to the British navy, reported separately that a vessel was listing roughly 24 nautical miles off the UAE’s Port Rashid — a sign, it said, that water may have been entering the hull after being struck by an unidentified projectile. Security sources placed that reported position near the Hercules Star.
