U.S. Crew Members Retake Ship Seized by Somali Pirates - Hijacking Is Latest in a Wave of Attacks Off Somalia's Coast, but First in Recent Memory on U.S. Ship
By Stephanie McCrummen
Copyright by The Washington Post
Wednesday, April 8, 2009; 12:39 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/08/AR2009040800940.html?hpid=topnews
NAIROBI, April 8 -- The crew of a U.S.-operated container ship that was hijacked by Somali pirates Wednesday has retaken control of the vessel, U.S. officials and the father of one of the American crew members said.
One pirate was reported to be under the control of the crew. The status of the other pirates was not immediately known, but a U.S. official said they were reported to be "in the water," the Associated Press reported.
The chief executive of the company that owns the container ship told a news conference in Norfolk, Va., that he could neither confirm nor deny the retaking of the 17,000-ton Maersk Alabama.
"Speculation is a dangerous thing when you're in a fluid environment," John Reinhart, CEO of Maersk Line Ltd., told reporters. "I will not confirm that the crew has overtaken this ship."
But Capt. Joseph Murphy, an instructor at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, told AP that his son Shane, the second in command on the ship, had called him to say the crew had regained control.
"The crew is back in control of the ship," a U.S. official said at midday Eastern time, AP reported. "It's reported that one pirate is on board under crew control -- the other three were trying to flee," the official said. The status of the other pirates was unknown, the official said, but they were reported to "be in the water."
Somali pirates seized the U.S.-operated container ship Wednesday with 20 American crew members on board, the latest in a spate of pirate attacks that have drawn an international flotilla of naval vessels to the waters off Somalia's coast.
A U.S. Navy spokeswoman, Cmdr. Jane Campbell, confirmed the attack on the Maersk Alabama, which was carrying food aid. She said it was the first seizure in recent memory of a U.S.-operated ship.
Campbell also noted that the pirates, who have been operating a multimillion-dollar shakedown business mostly in the crowded shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden, seem to be moving south to the less-controlled, open sea off Somalia's vast coast -- a shoreline roughly the length of the East Coast of the United States.
The Maersk Alabama was seized 500 miles south of the Gulf of Aden transit routes where most of the 20 or so naval vessels are patrolling, Campbell said. The nearest navy ship was about 300 miles away.
"It's an incredibly vast area, and basically we're seeing pirates in more than a million-square-mile operating area," said Campbell, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, based in Bahrain. "So while the presence of naval vessels has had an effect, we continue to say that naval presence alone will never be a total solution. It starts ashore."
That shore belongs to Somalia, where a newly elected transitional government is struggling to contain an Islamist insurgency with ties to al-Qaeda. Somalia's three main pirate networks are controlled by clan-based militias, which have so far remained separate from the Islamist insurgent group known as al-Shabab.
According to a businessman based in the Somali capital of Mogadishu who is in contact with the pirates who attacked the ship, the pirates did not know that the crew was American. The businessman spoke on the condition of anonymity for security reasons.
The Maersk Alabama is owned and operated by Maersk Line Ltd., which is based in Norfolk and part of the Copenhagen-headquartered A.P. Moller Maersk Group, according to a statement on the company's Web site.
It was the sixth ship to be seized in the past week, said Andrew Mwangura, coordinator for the East African Seafarer's Assistance Program based in Mombasa, Kenya, where the Maersk Alabama was headed.
Mwangura said the attack marks a rise in a piracy problem that cost companies $150 million in ransom last year. The attacks had been stemmed in recent months by patrolling navy ships sent from the United States, Russia, China, Turkey and Pakistan, among other nations.
There are now 18 ships being held by Somali pirates, a wily bunch who deploy a high- and low-tech arsenal of satellite phones, rocket-propelled grenades and wooden ladders to take over the massive container ships. Although there is no word yet on the fate of the Maersk Alabama crew, the pirates usually take sailors onto shore and begin negotiating hefty ransoms that fund lavish lifestyles centered in Somalia's pirate capital of Eyl, along the coast.
Campbell said that despite the deployment of heavily armed ships to combat piracy, at least three shipping companies have managed to fend off pirates recently using relatively low-tech methods.
One simply zigzagged, outmaneuvering the pirates, who typically attack in 15-foot skiffs. Another used flares and a water hose. The third one: old-fashioned barbed wire.
"These boats are usually armed to the teeth with RPGs and automatic weapons, but the method of boarding is literally tilting a ladder and climbing," she said. "In this case, when they got to the top of the ladder, the barbed wire was there."
Maritime officials reported that the pirate attack on the Maersk Alabama began late at night and lasted about five hours. Up to three pirate skiffs were said to be involved. The container ship's crew tried to take evasive action before the pirates eventually were able to board it.
Piracy experts attribute the recent surge in successful hijackings largely to an improvement in the weather in recent weeks.
U.S. Captain Is Hostage of Pirates; Navy Ship Arrives
By MARK MAZZETTI and SHARON OTTERMAN
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 8, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/world/africa/09pirates.html?th&emc=th
WASHINGTON — A high-seas drama unfolded off the coast of Africa on Wednesday, as Somali pirates seized a United States-flagged cargo ship and held 20 American sailors hostage. The crew managed to retake the ship within hours, but not before the pirates had spirited away the ship’s captain and held him for ransom.
The unarmed container ship, the Maersk Alabama, was the first American vessel to be captured in a wave of pirate attacks off the Horn of Africa, one of the most notoriously lawless stretches of international waters.
An episode that at times seemed ripped from the pages of a Robert Louis Stevenson novel had its own 21st-century twists: the pirates conducted ransom negotiations using satellite telephones, and a United States Navy guided missile destroyer and other warships were sent to aid the hostages.
But on Thursday morning local time, more than 15 hours after the pirates first took control of the Alabama, the talks were still at a standstill. The destroyer, the Bainbridge, arrived at the site before dawn, said Kevin Speers, a spokesman for Maersk Line Ltd., which owns the Alabama.
There have already been more than 60 attacks this year off the Somali coast, with more than 16 ships still in pirates’ hands as ransom negotiations continue, according to a spokesman for the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet.
In this case, however, the crew of the Alabama managed to disable the ship at about the time the pirates came on board, according to a senior American military official.
Sitting dead in the water without anywhere to go with their prize — and soon to be in the cross hairs of the American military — the four hijackers appeared to have been overrun by the ship’s crew and forced to adopt a new strategy. They loaded the ship’s captain into a lifeboat, shoved off from the cargo ship and began negotiating for his release.
The captain was identified as Richard Phillips of Underhill, Vt.
American officials praised the crew’s decision to disable the ship. The Alabama’s second in command, Capt. Shane Murphy, is the son of an instructor at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy who teaches a course on how to repel pirate attacks.
In a video interview with The Cape Cod Times, Capt. Joseph Murphy said his son was well trained and knew the dangers of the sea. The younger Captain Murphy spoke to his father’s class just a few weeks ago, shortly before boarding the ship that was hijacked Wednesday.
“He was prepared,” Captain Murphy said. “He knew and understood what the risks were. He also has the skills, obviously, to execute a plan.”
The crew appeared to have put some of these lessons into practice.
At one point, they ambushed and managed to capture one of the pirates, holding him "for 12 hours," Ken Quinn, the second mate on the ship, told CNN. They eventualy released the pirate in an attempted hostage exchange. "We returned him but they didn't return the captain," he said.
Maersk Line, based in Norfolk, Va., is one of the Defense Department’s main shipping contractors, though the ship was not under contract with the department at the time of the hijacking, a military spokesman said.
At the White House, military and national security officials tracked the developments from the Situation Room, and they provided several briefings to President Obama and other administration officials throughout the day.
Mr. Obama first learned of the hijacking early on Wednesday morning after he returned to the White House from his overseas trip, and he later convened an interagency group on maritime safety, aides said. The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said, “Our top priority is the personal safety of the crew members on board.”
The treacherous waters off the Horn of Africa are now patrolled by an international antipiracy armada of about 15 naval vessels, including 3 United States Navy ships.
But with most of the patrol vessels concentrated in the narrow Gulf of Aden, the pirates have expanded their reach into the open seas. At the time of the attack on the Maersk Alabama, the closest patrol vessel was about 300 nautical miles away, a Navy spokesman said.
“It’s that old saying: where the cops aren’t, the criminals are going to go,” said Lt. Nathan Christensen, a Fifth Fleet spokesman. “We patrol an area of more than one million square miles. The simple fact of the matter is that we can’t be everywhere at one time.”
While most of the pirate attacks off the Somali coast have ended peacefully, there have been exceptions. A year ago, French commandos seized six pirates during a helicopter raid after the attackers had freed the 30-member crew of a luxury yacht.
The 508-foot-long Alabama was en route to the Kenyan port of Mombasa and was carrying food and other agricultural materials for the World Food Program, a United Nations agency, and other clients, including the United States Agency for International Development.
The Alabama was on a regular rotation through the Indian Ocean from Salalah, a city in southwestern Oman, to Djibouti, and then on to Mombasa, according to the company’s headquarters in Denmark.
The ship, built in Taiwan in 1998, was less than half full, carrying about 400 20-foot containers of cargo like vegetable oil and bulgur wheat. It can hold more than 1,000 such containers, and it was deployed in Maersk Line’s East Africa service network, the company said.
Piracy has become a multimillion-dollar business in Somalia, a nation that has limped along since 1991 without a functioning central government. A Ukrainian arms freighter that was hijacked off Somalia’s coast in 2008, for example, was released in February after its owners paid $3.2 million in cash, which was dropped by parachute.
Armed with automatic weapons, the pirates often attack the large merchant ships from small speedboats, then scale the towering ship hulls with hooks and ropes and overtake the crew.
To extend their reach from shore, the pirates have begun operating from floating outposts known as “mother ships” — often captured fishing trawlers that can serve as bases for the smaller speedboats as they lie in wait.
Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington, and Sharon Otterman from New York. Katie Zezima contributed reporting from Boston, Jeff Zeleny from Washington and Mark McDonald from Hong Kong.
Both U.S. and Pirates Sending More Ships to Standoff
By MOHAMMED IBRAHIM and SHARON OTTERMAN
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 10, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/11/world/africa/11pirates.html?ref=global-home
MOGADISHU, Somalia — The American ship captain taken hostage by pirates in the Indian Ocean jumped into the water from their drifting lifeboat in an attempt to escape early Friday, but he was recaptured, defense officials said.
John Reinhart, the President and CEO of Maersk Line, during a news conference in Norfolk, Va. on Wednesday.
The standoff intensified Friday as American naval reinforcements moved toward the scene. There were also reports that the Somali pirates, desperate to get back to shore with their American captive, had themselves called in additional vessels and men.
The American captive, Capt. Richard Phillips, entered the water overnight, and was spotted by the U.S.S. Bainbridge, an American warship near the lifeboat, Defense Department officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the matter. He did not appear to be injured in the attempt, they said.
Captain Phillips was captured on Wednesday when four Somali pirates attempted to commandeer the Maersk Alabama, a 17,000-ton American-flagged container ship that was carrying food and relief aid to Mombasa, Kenya. The pirates gained control of the ship for a number of hours, but the unarmed American crew of 20 managed to overpower the pirates and retake command.
The pirates retreated into a large enclosed lifeboat, taking Captain Phillips as a hostage and apparently seeking a cash ransom. Alerted by a distress call, the Bainbridge, a Navy destroyer on patrol in the region because of pirate activity, arrived on the scene Thursday to take the lead in negotiating his release.
Hostage negotiators with the Federal Bureau of Investigation have also been asked for their assistance, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of Central Command and the overall military commander for the region, said on Thursday that other warships were headed to the scene.
Meanwhile, residents reached by telephone in the town of Xarardheere, a pirate haven in central Somalia, said the pirates were sending small boats with supplies, weapons and more pirates to the hostage scene.
The Associated Press reported that the pirates were sending larger ships — including previously hijacked ships with hostages still aboard — to serve as shields for the lifeboat , which had run out of fuel and was drifting.
The registered owner of the Maersk Alabama is Maersk Line, Ltd., a Norfolk, Va.-based subsidiary of A.P. Moller-Maersk, the giant Danish shipping concern, and it is a major shipping contractor for the Pentagon.
A Maersk Line spokesman said on Thursday that the ship had left the hostage scene at the Navy’s request to return to port. The father of the ship’s second-in-command, Capt. Shane Murphy, told news organizations that the ship was headed for its original destination, Mombasa, with an armed guard of 18 men, and that it was due to arrive there Saturday.
It was not immediately possible to confirm the Associated Press reports that additional large ships, including a German cargo ship seized by pirates earlier this month, were headed to the scene as reinforcements for the pirates.
A Somali resident of Eyl, the pirate stronghold in the Northern Puntland region of Somalia, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that two pirate ships had left Eyl Wednesday afternoon.
He said a third — the hijacked German cargo ship Hansa Stavanger — had sailed from Xarardheere, some 230 miles south along the Somali coast. A fourth, a Taiwanese fishing vessel seized Monday that was 30 miles from the lifeboat, was also on its way, he said. The man said there were a total of 52 hostages aboard the ships.
Residents of Xarardheere reached by The New York Times, however, said that the pirates had only sent small speedboats out to the scene.
The Associated Press also quoted another pirate in Xarardheere as saying that the pirates holding Captain Phillips were very worried about being killed in their standoff with the American warship, and that they had decided to defer talks about a ransom for Captain Phillips until they made it back to shore.
“They had asked us for reinforcement, and we have already sent a good number of well-equipped colleagues, who were holding a German cargo ship,” the pirate, identified only by the name, Badow, was quoted by The A.P. as saying.
“We are not intending to harm the captain, so that we hope our colleagues would not be harmed as long as they hold him,” Badow told them. “All we need, first, is a safe route to escape with the captain, and then ransom later,” he added.
Piracy is big business in Somalia, which has not had a functioning central government since 1991. Last year, some $80 million in ransoms were paid for the release of ships. There have already been more than 60 attacks this year off the Somali coast, with more than 16 ships still in pirates’ hands as ransom negotiations continue, according to a spokesman for the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet.
Somali pirate sources told Reuters on Friday that the Norwegian-owned, 23,000-tonne MT Bow Asir tanker captured at the end of March would be released shortly after a $2.4 million ransom was agreed with its owners.
A regional official confirmed the deal, saying he expected the ship — with its 27 crew including a Norwegian captain, 19 Filipinos, five Poles, one Russian and one Lithuanian — to be released later on Friday or Saturday, Reuters said.
Mohammed Ibrahim reported from Mogadishu, Somalia, and Sharon Otterman from New York. Elisabeth Bumiller contributed reporting from Washington
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