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According to rescuers, the ship sailed from the Turkish city to Stockholm, and at around 12:50 pm local (and Lithuanian) eventually ran aground near Marianhamina on the autonomous Åland islands, off the coast of Sweden.
“No one has been injured and no one is in danger, and the situation on board is stable,” Eleonora Hansi, information chief for Viking Line Scandinavia, told AFP.
The Amorella is 169 meters long and runs daily between Stockholm, Sweden and Turku, Finland.
The ferry typically carries between 1,800 and 2,000 passengers, but the pandemic has resulted in significantly fewer passengers this time, Hansi said.
“There were about 200 passengers and about 80 crew members on board,” Hansi said.
Local media reported that passengers in life jackets had gathered on deck.
The YLE station also reported that, as a result of the emergency signal sent by the crew, the impact on the seabed “caused cracks in several places.”
The Finnish Maritime Rescue Services reported on the social network Twitter that after the impact on the seabed, the ship was forced to approach the coast and ran aground “to stabilize the situation.”
“Amorella is firmly on the seabed and the 281 people on board were not in immediate danger, but the captain decided that all additional people should be evacuated from the ship,” the Western Finnish Coast Guard said.
Around 5:30 pm In local (and Lithuanian) time, the Coast Guard wrote on Twitter that all the passengers had been “evacuated ashore” and that some of the crew would soon be “evacuated”.
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