An air and sea rescue operation in Brazil’s Amazon delta was continuing on Sunday after a British Greenpeace activist went missing during a campaign against illegal logging.
Radio technician Emily Craddock (27) from Primrose Hill, north London, was last seen in the signals room of the Arctic Sunrise in the early hours of Friday by a river pilot as the ship approached the northern port of Belem, on the River Para.
But the crew did not realise she was missing until several hours later, when she failed to answer a muster call.
The ship, a former sealing vessel, turned round and its three inflatable boats, its own helicopter, a Greenpeace Cessna plane, and a helicopter from the Brazilian environment agency began to search.
Mhairi Dunlop, the Greenpeace spokesperson on international forests, said: ”The wake-up call was at 8am and she did not respond. We had a muster and she did not turn up.
”The moment that we found she was missing we turned the ship round and then began to zig zag across the river right back to the point where she was last known to be. We have been slowly working our way down the river.
”It is a very wide area of the Amazon where she went missing. We are not speculating anything at this point. The police investigation has begun and we are concentrating on trying to find her.”
The Foreign Office said it was in contact with Craddock’s family.
Craddock was one of several Britons among the 28 people on the ship. Greenpeace has been involved in tense standoffs with the illegal logging companies that continue to strip swaths of rainforest. Last year an area roughly the size of Belgium was destroyed, a 40% increase on 2001.
The Arctic Sunrise is on a mission to document the destruction: a move seen as unnecessary interference by the loggers. Greenpeace staff have been forced to take personal security measures.
In late November, loggers in river boats had tried to block the ship from the Xingu river, where most of the illegal logging takes place.
Loggers have also protested about large-scale government inspections in the region by locking federal police and officials of Brazil’s environmental protection agency, Ibama, in the organisation’s office in the nearby town of Altamira.
Craddock went to Loughborough University, then became a nursery school teacher.
She has worked for Greenpeace for four years. On the Arctic Sunrise, she dealt with satellite transmissions and sent out film footage to Greenpeace headquarters and to television companies.
Her enthusiasm for the campaign was shown by her entry on the ships log.
”Now we are in the Amazon wow! There are so many trees to hug I don’t know how I am going to do any radio work. We have to stop the illegal logging in this amazing place. We are in the lungs of the world and they are disappearing, stolen from our future children by greed and in an astonishingly violent, cut it all down attitude,” she wrote.
”It is up to all of us to make the changes in our lives as the trees cannot talk for themselves; they sometimes talk to me, but that is another story.” — Guardian Unlimited Â