The captain of a cruise ship involved in a fatal crash in Budapest last week was behind a similar collision in the Netherlands in April, prosecutors said. The Viking Sigyn crashed into a tourist boat, the Mermaid, on the Danube, on 29 May. The Mermaid then sank, killing 28.

The captain, a 64-year-old Ukrainian national named as Yuriy C, was later arrested. He denies any wrongdoing. Prosecutors said he was the captain of a cruise ship involved in a non-fatal crash in April in the Netherlands. Yuriy C was also accused of deleting data from his phone following the fatal crash in the Hungarian capital. Prosecutors said it was unclear whether the deleted data was related to the incident.

According to prosecutors, Yuriy C was the captain of a cruise ship that had collided with a cargo vessel while sailing from Antwerp to Ghent on 1 April. Prosecutors said that Eurojust – an EU law enforcement network – confirmed that he captained the ship that crashed in the Netherlands, but did not give further details.(BBC)…[+]