A newly arrived specialist tug will join efforts on Sunday night to float the giant container ship stranded in the Suez Canal, the ship's technical manager Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement (BSM) said in a statement.

"Further attempts to refloat the vessel will continue this evening once the tug is safely in position along with the 11 tugs already on site," the statement said.

The Dutch-flagged Alp Guard, a specialist tugboat, arrived at the location Sunday. Another Italian-flagged tugboat, Carlo Magno, was also close, having reached the Red Sea near the city of Suez early Sunday, satellite data from MarineTraffic.com showed.

The tugboats, along with at least 10 others already there, will be used to nudge the 400-meter-long Ever Given while dredgers continue to vacuum up sand from underneath the vessel and mud caked to its port side, BSM said.

BSM said the team was also waiting for the arrival of additional equipment to dredge the canal's seafloor. The THSD Causeway, a dredger registered in Cyprus, was expected to arrive by Tuesday.

Read more: How did a ship get stuck, and what happens next?

The MV Ever Given, which carries cargo between Asia and Europe, got stuck Tuesday in a single-lane stretch of the Suez Canal. A salvage team has been working for five days to unstick the vessel, and traffic through the canal – valued at over $9 billion a day – has been halted.

Major shippers are increasingly diverting their boats out of fear the vessel may take even longer to free.

Officials have been desperately trying to avoid unloading the vessel, which likely would add even more days to the canal's closure. Taking containers off the ship would require a crane and other equipment that have yet to arrive.

On Saturday, asked about when they expected to free the vessel and reopen the canal, the head of the Suez Canal Authority said: "I can't say because I do not know."

(With input from agencies)