THE sole survivor from the French fishing vessel that sank off Alderney has described seeing a ‘huge mountain’ looming above him before being struck.

The boat took only a few minutes to sink,’ said Jean-Michel Gueno, a 19-year-old who was picked up from a liferaft an hour after the tragedy after firing a distress flare.

It was his first trip to sea as an apprentice fisherman.

French authorities now believe that ‘mountain’ was a 9,200-ton chemical transporter called the Sichem Pandora, which was on its way from Tunisia to the Netherlands.

It is thought the ship ploughed into the 15-metre longliner, the Kleine Familie, in the early hours of Thursday, killing five of the six crew.

At a press conference last night, Cherbourg procureur Michel Garrandaux, a public prosecutor, revealed that paint found on the hull of the ship was ‘identical’ to that from the Kleine Familie.

He said: ‘There is no difference chemically between the traces of paint found on the Sichem Pandora and the Kleine Familie’s paint.’