SANCTIONS
After outpacing a European naval mission, cargo ship remains stranded in Libya
Less than a year after it was abandoned off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, the Med Sea Eagle delivered military equipment to a Libyan strongman, leaked documents reveal.
Over the past two years, the Med Sea Eagle has become a floating symbol of the lawlessness and impunity that have dogged commercial shipping on the high seas.
The cargo ship’s then-owners abandoned it in June 2023, and conditions grew so dire that one crew member attempted suicide. Then, last summer, a company that chartered the Med Sea Eagle allegedly bribed its crew to deliver high-speed boats and “military tactical” vehicles to Libya, according to leaked emails written by the ship’s owner.
Increasingly, the world’s maritime shipping lanes are becoming crime zones. Thousands of seafarers are abandoned at sea each year, often stuck aboard deteriorating vessels without pay, provisions or medical care. Sanctions enforcement is also sporadic, due in part to challenges around jurisdiction and tactics used by sanctions-evading vessels to avoid detection. In a leaked presentation, a European Union naval operation launched in 2020 to enforce the arms embargo on Libya described its mission as akin to finding “a needle in a haystack.”
Shipping companies willing to break the law “find that there are very few restraints on criminal conduct,” said Alexandra Wrage, the president of the anti-corruption association TRACE.
The Med Sea Eagle is 320 feet long and can haul the equivalent of 170 New York City subway cars. It was built in China in 2020, then sold to the Turkey-based Sea Lion Shipping Co in late 2022. Sea Lion Shipping ran into financial trouble soon after it bought the Med Sea Eagle and abandoned the ship and its crew off the coast of the UAE in June 2023. The crew wasn’t paid for months and ran short of food, water and medicine within sight of one of the world’s wealthiest countries.
Some crew members began to panic. One took a potentially lethal dose of painkillers and was taken ashore to a hospital for medical treatment by Emirati authorities — then forced to return to the dismal conditions aboard the Med Sea Eagle.
In a video taken aboard the ship and reviewed by ICIJ, another frantic seafarer held a kitchen knife against their arm. They said that crew members were being poisoned and dying. “I’m going to slit my wrists now,” they said. “I just can’t take it anymore.”
Such “abandonments” by owners are a growing problem in the shipping industry. In 2024, the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), a transport workers and seafarers union, reported that 3,133 seafarers were abandoned by their ship-owners, marking the worst year on record. The UAE was the most frequent site of these abandoned vessels. Sandra Bernal, a coordinator for the ITF, told ICIJ that as abandoned crews grow desperate, “the vessel can begin to feel like a prison.”
Sea Lion Shipping’s website is defunct, and an inquiry sent to the company’s email address could not be delivered.
Suspicious cargo
In the aftermath of the Med Sea Eagle’s abandonment off the coast of the UAE, the vessel was sold to another Turkish firm, the Atlantic Dignity Co., and took on a new crew.
On a scorching hot day in July 2024, the ship was crawling through the Suez Canal on its way toward the Mediterranean Sea. And its owner was watching its progress with growing alarm.
“[W]ith the cooperation of bribed crew, my vessel is passing Suez with suspicious cargo, totally out of my control,” Mehmet Fatih Erzincanlı, who described himself as the owner of the Med Sea Eagle, wrote in an email to the EU naval mission before the ship docked in Libya.
Leaked documents from the naval mission, called Operation Irini, also identify Erzincanlı as the owner of the Med Sea Eagle. But that might not be the entire story. The vessel has been stalled in a Libyan port ever since its journey there, and people with knowledge of the matter said it has been subject to legal disputes in multiple countries.
The suspicious cargo, according to the Operation Irini documents, included five high-speed boats, four American-made Humvees and nearly 60 light trucks.
In a separate leaked email, Erzincanlı wrote that he believed that the light trucks were armored and intended for military use. He wrote that he was alerting the naval mission because he did not want to be party to an effort to violate the embargo.
A U.N. report would later identify the high-speed boats carried by the Med Sea Eagle as part of a larger shipment of naval vessels to Khalifa Haftar, the U.S.-Libyan strongman who holds sway in the war-torn country’s east. The report identified some of these vessels in a military parade put on by Haftar’s forces, which had mounted weapons on the boats.
Anas El Gomati, director of the Tripoli-based Sadeq Institute, told ICIJ the boats allow Haftar’s forces to control migration flows from Libya to Europe. Haftar’s militia has reportedly used brutal tactics to bring migrants back to Libya, an effort for which he has received European assistance. Haftar seeks to establish himself as “Europe’s migration gatekeeper,” El Gomati said, a role that “brings both financial support and diplomatic legitimacy.”
The speedboats also allow Haftar to control lucrative maritime smuggling corridors and intimidate vessels en route to ports controlled by the rival government in western Libya. “The boats aren’t just military assets,” El Gomati said. “They’re leverage in Haftar’s ongoing campaign to be recognized as Libya’s legitimate authority despite controlling only part of the country.”
Erzincanlı, the Med Sea Eagle’s owner, wrote in his email to the EU naval mission that the company that chartered the Med Sea Eagle was a Dubai-based firm named Nayzak Cargo LLC, which he said provided him with a detailed list of the cargo only after the ship had left port in the UAE. Erzincanlı said he ordered the vessel to stop south of the Suez Canal, but that Nayzak Cargo bribed the crew to continue to Benghazi, Libya.
Erzincanlı added that the crew had cut communications with his company and was ignoring outreach from governments and international organizations. Shipowners are typically responsible for the crew’s employment and welfare, and the crew is obligated to follow the owner’s instructions.
One crew member aboard the Med Sea Eagle at the time described his “bad experience,” and confirmed in WhatsApp messages to ICIJ that Nayzak Cargo ultimately paid for crew members’ journeys from Benghazi back to their home countries.
“I am thankful for their help,” wrote the crew member. “I’m done with the story [of the] Med Sea Eagle.”
Nayzak Cargo and Erzincanlı did not respond to requests from ICIJ for comment.
‘Everybody is so afraid’
In the case of the Med Sea Eagle, all the typical avenues for stopping a vessel suspected of carrying illicit military equipment failed.
Egyptian authorities showed no interest in stopping the vessel as it passed through the Suez Canal. Erzincanlı wrote that his firm warned Egypt’s Suez Canal Authority and the Ministry of Defense about the cargo, but no one stopped the ship. The Egyptian government is allied with Haftar and has been accused of sending him military equipment.
“Everybody is so afraid [of] helping us and doing anything for this vessel,” Erzincanlı wrote.
The final institution capable of stopping the Med Sea Eagle was Operation Irini. Erzincanlı told the mission about the cargo on July 12, giving the force a narrow window to interdict the ship before it entered Libyan territorial waters. As the ship passed through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, Operation Irini officials scrambled to learn more about it and Erzincanlı, according to leaked documents, sending out requests for information to partner law enforcement agencies.
They were too slow. On July 15, the EU naval mission requested consent from Panama, the flag state, to board and inspect the Med Sea Eagle, writing that it had “reasonable grounds to believe that [the] vessel could be involved in arms trafficking, in violation of the arms embargo on Libya.”
Seven hours later, the vessel entered Libyan territorial waters, out of the reach of European authorities. According to tracking data, the ship had been traveling in international waters while off the coast of Egypt; had the naval mission been quicker, it might have stopped the Med Sea Eagle. Because it was not inspected, there was never a final determination of whether its cargo violated the arms embargo.
The maritime sanctions-evasion business is booming — and law enforcement authorities are struggling to keep up. The number of vessels sanctioned by Western nations has more than doubled since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with more than 1,000 ships now on global sanctions lists. More vessels were sanctioned in 2024 than in any previous year.
Smugglers have the benefit that it’s easier to abuse loopholes … than it is for varying authorities to find consensus and muster the willpower and costs to close these loopholes. — security analyst Min Chao Choy
Min Chao Choy, lead analyst at the Washington-based global security nonprofit C4ADS, said that smugglers exploit a lack of coordination between national authorities at sea to their advantage. “There are so many stakeholders in sanctions enforcement,” she told ICIJ. “Smugglers have the benefit that it’s easier to abuse loopholes … than it is for varying authorities to find consensus and muster the willpower and costs to close these loopholes.”
The Med Sea Eagle, meanwhile, has remained docked in Benghazi for nearly a year, according to an analysis of recent satellite images. The UAE banned the vessel from its waters in September 2024, and court documents show that Erzincanlı was detained in the UAE in January 2025 for lying to an Emirati court about the authenticity of legal documents.
In a leaked memo, a legal adviser to Operation Irini noted that the vessel eluded the naval mission. He suggested that this wouldn’t be the last time law enforcement authorities took an interest in the Med Sea Eagle. “You should hear about this ship again,” he wrote.