Nwicker60
27-Oct-11, 19:21
Relatives' leader takes her case to First Minister
THE persistent leader of a group of seafaring wives who lost their menfolk in a fishing boat tragedy off the Caithness coast has taken her fight to the Scottish Parliament.
Jennie Ritchie has vowed not to give up her campaign to prove that the trawler, Trident was unstable when she foundered in the Moray Firth, 37 years ago.
Mrs Ritchie has a meeting today with First Minister Alex Salmond whom she hopes to persuade to conduct a judicial review into the loss of the Peterhead trawler. No indication was given as to how the talks went.
The Trident went down in 1974 with the loss of all seven of her crew. An inquiry found that the vessel had foundered after being sucked into a large pocket of water.
The relatives refused to accept the decision but were not in a position to take the matter any further until the wreck of the trawler was discovered by chance in the summer of 2001.by a group of Orkney divers, searching for the destroyer HMS Exmouth, sunk by a German U-boat,during the Second World War.
The Trident relatives mounted a campaign and won a fresh inquiry.
Sir Stephen Young, sheriff principal of Grampian, Highlands and Islands, earlier said in his findings, that the loss of the Trident was not caused, or contributed to, by any wrongful act.
He said a loose trawl net may have contributed to the vessel's instability but no-one was to blame for the loss of the Trident.
Earlier this year, Mrs Ritchie came north to Wick and witnessed the return of a lamp which had been erroneously removed from The Trident during an official subsea assessment of the wreck. She made it plain, then, that the fight to prove in instability of the vessel was not over.
THE persistent leader of a group of seafaring wives who lost their menfolk in a fishing boat tragedy off the Caithness coast has taken her fight to the Scottish Parliament.
Jennie Ritchie has vowed not to give up her campaign to prove that the trawler, Trident was unstable when she foundered in the Moray Firth, 37 years ago.
Mrs Ritchie has a meeting today with First Minister Alex Salmond whom she hopes to persuade to conduct a judicial review into the loss of the Peterhead trawler. No indication was given as to how the talks went.
The Trident went down in 1974 with the loss of all seven of her crew. An inquiry found that the vessel had foundered after being sucked into a large pocket of water.
The relatives refused to accept the decision but were not in a position to take the matter any further until the wreck of the trawler was discovered by chance in the summer of 2001.by a group of Orkney divers, searching for the destroyer HMS Exmouth, sunk by a German U-boat,during the Second World War.
The Trident relatives mounted a campaign and won a fresh inquiry.
Sir Stephen Young, sheriff principal of Grampian, Highlands and Islands, earlier said in his findings, that the loss of the Trident was not caused, or contributed to, by any wrongful act.
He said a loose trawl net may have contributed to the vessel's instability but no-one was to blame for the loss of the Trident.
Earlier this year, Mrs Ritchie came north to Wick and witnessed the return of a lamp which had been erroneously removed from The Trident during an official subsea assessment of the wreck. She made it plain, then, that the fight to prove in instability of the vessel was not over.