The Contship Jet sank around midnight on October 28 after taking three hits from drone boats about 21 nautical miles southeast of Shabla, turning a fast-moving rescue into a wreck off Bulgaria's Black Sea coast. All 18 sailors got off alive before the ship went down.
The sinking is being searched now because it came after a day of racing to save the crew and before dawn could blunt the damage. Bulgaria's maritime authorities confirmed the loss on October 29, but the ship had already gone under with 421 containers aboard, a reminder that the emergency was over for the people on board long before it was over for the vessel.
Dimitar Stoyanov placed the ship outside Bulgarian territorial waters but inside Bulgaria's exclusive economic zone as it worked its way up the coast from Haifa to Constanta. The alert reached Bulgaria from Romania's maritime rescue center in Constanta at 12:01 p.m. local time on October 28, and by 12:13 the 18 sailors had abandoned ship. The Bulgarian Navy sent the corvette Reshitelni, the rescue vessel Proteo and a fast boat with hull number 223, while a Border Police ship also headed out.
By 12:53, eight sailors were aboard a Navy boat and ten were riding in the ship's own lifeboat. The crew included 14 Filipinos and four Ukrainians, and nobody was hurt. A Navy ship then carried them to Varna, while the freighter — a 524-foot vessel built in Spain nearly 20 years ago and rated for 1,267 standard 20-foot containers — was left to drift with a cargo that included lithium-ion batteries, acids and other corrosives, ethanol and other flammable liquids, household chemicals, plastics, food, building supplies, lumber and machinery parts.
Kiril Mihaylov said that evening that 20 of the ship's containers had already gone over the side. That detail matters because it shows the attack did not end when the crew escaped; the damage kept unfolding until the Contship Jet finally sank around midnight. The Maritime Administration said it does not expect a spill to reach the Bulgarian coast, but the loss still deepens a pattern that has now reached five merchant ships hit by drones in Bulgaria's exclusive economic zone since early October.
What remains unanswered is the point of the attack itself. The vessel was chartered by ZIM, but the reason it was targeted off Bulgaria and who launched the drone boats has not been explained.
