The commander of the Zairian navy patrol was informed that he would be dismissed from his position, he confirmed CM official source of Armada.
We are talking about violations revealed by an audit after the ship was forced to return to the naval base in Lisbon this Wednesday due to bad weather at sea while it was heading to Funchal, where it was supposed to hand over the corvette António Enes to the mission in maritime zone of Madeira. The high waves, which sailors call malagueiros, washed over the ship’s bridge, which is normal under the circumstances, and affected a transformer in the ECDIS system for electronic navigation charts, causing smoke but no fire, military sources said. However, this transformer has been replaced.
Moreover, the Navy denies comments circulating among service members that there was a fire on board and says discharges and surrenders are routine actions, with the Zaire event already scheduled for the next few weeks and now being tabled.
ABOUT CM It is known from unofficial sources that the dismissal will not be related to the failure of the mission, but to the identified violations, including failure to fill out the navigation log for the last 11 months.
Officially, the Navy only states that the corvette António Enes will continue to carry out its mission in the Madeira maritime zone.
Interestingly, these are the two oldest active ships in the Navy: Zaire with a service life of 52 years and Antonio Enes with a service life of 53 years.
Zaire was heading to her first commission in Madeira after returning from five and a half years of training with the Sao Tome and Principe Coast Guard. But last year the shipyard became the target of an intervention that will keep it operational for several more years.
Unofficial military sources regret that both the Zaire and Antonio Enes, built for foreign wars, are still in active service, attributing this fact to successive delays in the construction of new patrol ships caused by tender problems in the Ministry of Defense. (a new contract for the construction of six ocean patrols was finally signed last December).