Somali pirates hijack US-flagged ship

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-04-09 07:42

NAIROBI: Somali pirates yesterday hijacked a US-flagged cargo ship with 20 American crew members onboard, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest American military vessel in some of the most dangerous waters in the world.

United Kingdom maritime officials have been able to contact the vessel and were told "everyone is OK," according to a US defense official in Washington who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

British maritime and defense officials did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment.

The 17,000-ton Maersk Alabama was carrying emergency relief to Mombasa, Kenya, when it was hijacked, said Peter Beck-Bang, spokesman for the Copenhagen-based container shipping group A.P. Moller-Maersk. It was the sixth ship seized within a week, a rise that analysts attribute to a new strategy by Somali pirates who are operating far from the warships patrolling the Gulf of Aden.

The company confirmed that the US-flagged vessel has 20 US nationals onboard.

Commander Jane Campbell, a spokeswoman for the US Navy's Bahrain-based 5th Fleet, said that it was the first pirate attack "involving US nationals and a US-flagged vessel in recent memory." She did not give an exact timeframe.

Press secretary Robert Gibbs said the White House was monitoring the incident closely and "assessing a course of action."

"Our top priority is the personal safety of the crew members on board," Gibbs said.

When asked how the US Navy plans to deal with the hijacking, Campbell said she would "not discuss nor speculate on current and future military operations."

It was not clear whether the pirates knew they were hijacking a ship with American crew.

"It's a very significant foreign policy challenge for the Obama administration," said Graeme Gibbon Brooks, managing director of the British company Dryad Maritime Intelligence Service Ltd. "Their citizens are in the hands of criminals and people are waiting to see what happens."

Brooks and other analysts declined to speculate on whether American military forces might attempt a rescue operation. A senior Navy official in Washington said the Obama administration was talking to the shipping company to learn "the who, what, why, where and when" of the hijacking.

The US Navy confirmed that the ship was hijacked early yesterday about 450 km southeast of Eyl, a town in the northern Puntland region of Somalia.

Noel Choong, who heads the International Maritime Bureau, a piracy watchdog group in Kuala Lumpur, said depending on the speed of the ship, and where the pirates wanted to take it, it could take a day or two to reach shore.

US Navy spokesman Lieutenant Nathan Christensen said the closest US ship at the time of the hijacking was 555 km away.

"The area, the ship was taken in, is not where the focus of our ships has been," Christensen said by phone from the 5th Fleet's Mideast headquarters in Bahrain. "The area we're patrolling is more than a million miles in size. Our ships cannot be everywhere at every time."

(China Daily 04/09/2009 page12)