The European Commission charged that the Prestige passed through Gibraltar "several times" since 1999 without once being inspected

BRUSSELS, November 20 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The European Commission refused Wednesday, November 20, to bow to British demands for an apology over charges that Gibraltar bore part of the responsibility for the "Prestige" oil disaster off northern Spain, as Britain hit back strongly at insinuations that port authorities in its colony of Gibraltar were partly to blame for the sinking of the oil tanker.

In a letter sent Tuesday, November 19, to the European Commission, Britain insisted that Transport Commissioner Loyola de Palacio was in the wrong, and said she should publicly admit the fact.

The Prestige had only been to Gibraltar once in the past five years, on June 13 this year, "to re-fuel, without even entering the port", wrote Britain's ambassador to the European Union, Sir Nigel Sheinwald.

"The brief call by this ship at Gibraltar five months ago for refueling could not reasonably have been expected to attract a full port state control inspection," he said in the letter obtained Wednesday by Agence France-Presse (AFP).

But de Palacio's spokesman, Gilles Gantelet disagreed. Existing E.U. regulations made no distinction between a re-fuelling stop and a longer port call, he told AFP.

E.U. member states "must firmly apply all safety measures and conduct the most rigorous inspections", he said.

Sheinwald said he was "dismayed" by de Palacio "suggesting that Gibraltar was responsible for this incident, and regret that the Commissioner did not confirm the facts first".

"I must therefore insist that the Commission now confirm publicly that the U.K. and Gibraltar have no responsibility for this incident.

"This statement should be of equal prominence to the Commission's previous statements suggesting the contrary."

The European Commission, the E.U.'s executive arm, has said that the Prestige passed through Gibraltar "several times" since 1999 without once being inspected.

Fears are growing in northwestern Spain that the sinking of the Prestige will wreak havoc on wildlife, the environment and the economy.

The sinking of the oil tanker off Spain's coast could in the long term be one of the deadliest such accidents for the wildlife

The tanker split in two and sank Tuesday off Galicia, after spewing thousands of tons of fuel oil into the sea and creating an environmental disaster along one of Europe's most picturesque and wildlife-rich coasts.

"The United Kingdom fully sympathizes with the Spanish authorities in the face of the serious environmental problem which the Prestige poses," Sheinwald added, reiterating British offers of help in tackling the oil spill.

E.U. directives required harbor authorities to check at least 25 percent of ships returning to their ports, and the Commission wrote to British authorities November 14 demanding answers over the Prestige.

De Palacio reiterated that she wanted more information from British and Greek authorities – the Prestige visited the port of Kalamata in June, according to Sheinwald's letter.

If changes sought by Brussels had already been in place, "that would have meant that the Prestige, in Gibraltar this summer, would have been subject to rigorous inspection," de Palacio added.

"This is for the very simple reason that the Prestige is more than 15 years old and it's a single-hull oil tanker."

The commissioner wrote Tuesday to E.U. states urging them to implement "urgently" Europe-wide rules on maritime safety agreed in 2000 after the last major such disaster, involving the Erika tanker off the French coast in 1999.

The commission hopes to phase out all single-skin freighters by 2015 in favor of ships with reinforced hulls, which are seen as safer.

In the letter to Francois Lamoureux, the director-general of de Palacio's transport and energy department, Sheinwald said British authorities had carried out detailed checks on the movements of the Prestige since 1997.

These checks were carried out using commercial data sources, "which are also available to the Commission", and showed that the ship had passed by Gibraltar only once in 1998 and again the next year without actually calling into the port.

Meanwhile, the oil spill from the sunken tanker Prestige has polluted 295 kilometres (180 miles) of coastline along northwestern Spain, causing damage estimated at 42 million euros (dollars), Spain said Wednesday.

Some 90 once-pristine beaches of the Galicia coast between La Coruna and Cape Finisterre on the northwestern tip of Spain, covering some 1.5 million square meters (16 million square feet), have been affected, said Spanish Environment Minister Jaume Matas.

Matas said during a visit to the stricken region that the clean-up operation would take at least six months before "the coast will be again what it once was."

A French conservation group also said Wednesday thousands of birds are at risk following the sinking of the oil tanker off Spain's coast, which in the long term could be one of the deadliest such accidents for the wildlife.

Allain Bougrain-Dubourg, president of the League for the Protection of Birds, told AFP that in the short term, the threat posed to birds by the wreck of the Prestige was less serious than that created by the Erika disaster off France three years ago.

"There is no comparable concentration of birds" in the affected area off Spain's northwestern coast, where the Prestige broke in two and sank Tuesday, than off France's Brittany shores, where the Erika sank in 1999.

But Bougrain-Dubourg warned: "It would be best if the ship's cargo flowed out as quickly as possible... If it oozes out toward the coast over a period of several years, many coastal birds will be affected and the long-term toll will be catastrophic — it could be worse than the Erika."

More than 250 birds of 18 species have washed up on the shores of Galicia so far.

Bougrain-Dubourg said his organization especially feared for the future of the endangered Balearic Shearwater puffin, explaining that only 5,000 couples of the species remain.

"For the moment, it has not been affected, but it passes through that zone," he said.

Between 150,000 and 300,000 birds died as a result of the Erika disaster, according to Bougrain-Dubourg.

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