Denmark has suspended navigation within the Nice Belt over a technical drawback with a warship
A malfunctioning missile launcher on board a Royal Danish Navy frigate brought on a six-hour closure of the Nice Belt strait on Thursday.
HDMS Niels Juel, named after a Seventeenth-century Danish admiral, was moored on the Korsoer naval base on the island of Zeeland. The vessel was performing a take a look at whereas at anchor when the crew seen an issue with the Harpoon anti-ship missile system. The missile’s booster grew to become lively and couldn’t be switched off.
“Till the booster is disabled, there’s a threat that the missile might launch and fly a number of kilometers away,” the Danish navy mentioned in a press release.
The Nationwide Maritime Authority issued a warning, closing the airspace and the delivery lane west of the Korsoer naval station because of the potential threat of “falling missile fragments.” The US-designed Harpoon is often armed with a warhead containing 150kg of explosives.
Specialists deployed on board carried out a sequence of diagnostics and ultimately established that the booster was not armed, so the missile couldn’t launch.
The incident with Niels Juel got here only a day after Denmark’s high officer was fired for failing to report one other naval malfunction. Protection Minister Troels Lund Poulsen introduced on Wednesday he had “misplaced belief” in Common Flemming Lentfer.
Lentfer allegedly didn’t inform Copenhagen of the truth that the radar and the missile techniques of HMDS Iver Huitfeldt had failed when it got here below assault off the coast of Yemen just lately.
The Danish frigate was deployed to the Crimson Sea as a part of an EU mission to guard worldwide delivery from the Houthi rebels, who’ve blockaded Israeli-linked ships – in addition to US and UK service provider vessels – in protest over the siege of Gaza.
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