Russian navy searching for missing cargo ship

The ship, called the Arctic Sea, was due to make port in Algeria on Aug. 4 to deliver its cargo. It never arrived. All attempts to raise the ship on radio or locate its emergency beacon have failed.

“Unfortunately, the location of the ship is still not known,’’ Viktor Matveyev, the director of Solchart, the ship’s Finland-based operator, said by telephone on Tuesday. “There have been no communications and no signals from the instrument that transmitted the ship’s location.’’

Though details are still murky, word of the missing ship has conjured images of the daring pirate raids frequent in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia’s coast. Before it disappeared, the captain radioed that unidentified men claiming to be police had raided the ship, but he said they had released it. An anchor for Russia’s NTV television called the Arctic Sea the “first ship captured by pirates in Europe.’’

Amid fears of a possible hijacking, Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, ordered his defense minister to take charge of the search, the Kremlin website said. Warships from the Russian Black Sea Fleet have already joined the search, according to Aleksei Kuznetsov, a spokesman for the Defense Ministry. A Defense Ministry source also told the Interfax news agency the Navy had employed its satellite-based tracking systems.

So far, nothing.

“It is quite difficult to try to determine what could have happened,’’ said Cyrus Mody, a spokesman for the London-based International Maritime Bureau. “It would not go down without a trace, but in the shipping industry anything is possible.’’

While the vessel’s fate remained a mystery, shipping experts tended to discount the idea that piracy was involved, noting the ship was relatively small and carrying a low-value cargo of wood.

They said it could have been hijacked by an organized criminal gang, perhaps in pursuit of drugs or some other illicit materials stashed on board or to test the security environment in preparation for future attacks.

What is clear is that the Arctic Sea had a rough voyage from the outset. Flying a Maltese flag, it was traversing Swedish waters on July 24 when it was overtaken by a small boat and boarded by eight to 12 men carrying firearms, the Malta Maritime Authority said in a statement. The intruders were “allegedly masked and wearing uniforms’’ with “police’’ written on them, the statement said, and harshly interrogated the crew, saying they were checking the ship for illegal narcotics.

“The members of the crew were allegedly assaulted, tied, gagged and blindfolded and some of them were seriously injured,’’ the statement said.

It is not clear who the men were. Officials from Sweden, which had jurisdiction over the waters where the search took place, said they were not involved, the Malta Maritime Authority said.

The ship’s captain radioed authorities after the 12-hour ordeal, saying the intruders had left in their small boat, Matveyev said. The captain said he would keep the ship on course to Algeria.

A spokeswoman for the Maritime and Coastguard Agency in Britain said the ship contacted it at 1:52 p.m. on July 28, when it was traveling through the Dover Strait between England and France.

“The Dover Coastguard didn’t notice anything unusual,’’ the spokeswoman said. “A lot of vessels go through the strait every day, and this one made a routine report and it didn’t seem anything was wrong.’’