WORLD NEWS

STOCKHOLM: Around 50 ships, including large ferries carrying thousands, were stuck in the ice in the Baltic Sea, with many unable to move until Friday, Swedish maritime authorities said.

Several vessels, including at least one passenger ferry carrying more than 1,000 people, had collided with each other as they drifted amid huge blocks of moving ice.

But the Viking Line ferry company insisted "there was at no time any danger to the passengers."

Around 50 commercial vessels and as many as six large passenger ferries had been stuck in the ice Thursday, Johny Lindvall of the Swedish Maritime Administration's ice breaker unit told media around 1930 GMT.

Two of the ferries, including the large Isabella passenger ferry carrying 1,322 passengers and crew, had been freed, he said.

Four other ships, including the Amorella, another passenger ferry carrying 1,313 people, were still stuck.

At around 2300 GMT, Swedish public radio reported that a third vessel, a cargo ship, had been freed from the area.

The ferries, nearly all transporting passengers between Sweden and Finland, had run into trouble just outside the Stockholm archipelago, made up of more than 20,000 islands, Lindvall said.

"They got caught outside the archipelago, where there is moving ice. It's hard to navigate," he said, adding that he had not seen a situation with so many ships stuck at once since the mid-1980s.

Sweden has suffered an unusually harsh winter this year, with temperatures across the country almost continuously well below freezing since December.

With freezing winds whipping the Baltic over the past week, it was easy for ships to get caught in the ice, Lindvall said.