The “Stena Scandica” was providing a link between Latvia and Sweden in the Baltic Sea when the alarm was given around 12:30 p.m. local time (10:30 a.m. GMT) of a fire on board, according to the company and the rescue services.
According to the company Stena Line which operates the ferry, the fire seems to have spread from a refrigerated truck on the car deck.
“The fire is out,” Lisa Mjörning, a spokeswoman for the Swedish maritime authority, told AFP at around 1:30 p.m. GMT.
“In the next three or four hours, the ferry will be towed to the port,” she explained.
The ferry was making a crossing between the Latvian port of Ventspils and that of Nynäshamn, near Stockholm, where it will be towed.
All 300 people on the ferry (about 240 passengers and 60 crew) remained on board, the spokeswoman said, correcting initial information that an evacuation had begun.
“There were no injuries on board and there was no evacuation,” according to the maritime authority.
The fire was described by a Stena Line spokesperson as “a limited fire, concentrated around a refrigerated truck on the vehicle deck”, with “mostly smoke”.
Three helicopters and seven ships were dispatched to the scene. Another ferry had been diverted in case of need to evacuate.
The Stena Scandica is off the island of Gotska Sandön, southeast of the Swedish coast.
One of the worst disasters of the 20th century took place between the Baltic countries and Sweden in September 1994, when the ferry “Estonia” sank. By night, 852 people had died.
