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Crew retakes US ship from pirates, captain held
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-04-09 09:13

Crew retakes US ship from pirates, captain held
This undated image made available in London, Wednesday April 8, 2009 by Maersk Line, shows the Maersk Arun, sister ship to the 17,000-ton container ship Maersk Alabama. [Agencies]

It was the sixth vessel seized within a week, a rise that analysts attribute to a new strategy by Somali pirates operating far from the warships patrolling the busiest shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden. Cmdr. 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.

The ship was carrying emergency food relief to Mombasa, Kenya, when it was hijacked, the Copenhagen-based container shipping group A.P. Moller-Maersk said.

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The vessel's manifest showed it was carrying 401 containers of food aid from USAID, Serving God Ministries, the World Food Program and Catholic Relief, said John F. Reinhart, president and CEO of Maersk Line Ltd

Merchant crews aren't supposed to fight pirates, short of using high-pressure hoses to try to stop them from climbing aboard, Reinhart said.

"They (the crews) don't have any weapons, so it would be inappropriate for them to try to be heroes. We'd like them to come home safely," he told a news conference.

Capt. Joseph Murphy, a professor at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, said his son was a 2001 graduate who recently talked to a class about the dangers of piracy.

The younger Murphy wrote on his Facebook profile that he worked in waters between Oman and Kenya "infested with pirates that highjack (sic) ships daily,"

"I feel like it's only a matter of time before my number gets called," he wrote on the page, which features a photograph of him.

Somali pirates are trained fighters who frequently dress in military fatigues and use speedboats equipped with satellite phones and GPS equipment. They are typically armed with automatic weapons, anti-tank rocket launchers and various types of grenades. Far out to sea, their speedboats operate from larger mother ships.

Since January, pirates have staged 66 attacks, and they are still holding 14 ships and 260 crew members as hostages, according to the International Maritime Bureau, a watchdog group based in Kuala Lumpur.

There are fewer than 200 US-flagged vessels in international waters, said Larry Howard, chair of the Global Business and Transportation Department at SUNY Maritime College in New York.

Roger Middleton, a piracy expert at the London-based think tank Chatham House, said the anti-piracy efforts in the Gulf of Aden have pushed the pirates into the Indian Ocean — a much vaster area where backup is no longer quickly in reach.

"Now that the pirates are launching attacks in the Indian Ocean, they have this huge area," Middleton said.

Ships trying to protect themselves against pirates are recommended to constantly be on the lookout for pirates, travel at full speed, and take evasive procedures such as using water cannons and fire hoses to flood the engines of the pirates' skiffs, Middleton said.

But even those procedures aren't foolproof in the face of pirates often armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades.

"They have guns, and the crew don't," Middleton said.

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