Hijacked Supertanker Anchors Off Somalia - Download Free Phim, Nhac, Phan Mem, Karaoke

conmeo · #1 (**permalink**) 11-19-2008, 03:45 AM

Hijacked Supertanker Anchors Off Somalia

The Sirius Star, a Saudi oil tanker now held by pirates, in an undated photo. The ship was anchored off Somalia on Tuesday.

A hijacked Saudi-owned supertanker carrying more than $100 million worth of crude oil was anchored off the coast of Somalia on Tuesday and the ship’s owner said it was working to free the ship and its 25-member crew.

The owner, Vela International, a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabia-based oil giant Saudi Aramco, said in a statement that the company was awaiting further contact from the pirates who seized the vessel about 480 miles off the coast of Somalia. Earlier reports had said that the 1,080-foot-long ship, Sirius Star, had been hijacked off the Kenyan coast.

The company did not say specifically that it had begun negotiations with the hijackers. The supertanker, about the same length as an American Nimitz class aircraft carrier, is the largest ship known to have been seized by pirates, and it was fully loaded with two million barrels of oil.

“Our first and foremost priority is ensuring the safety of the crew,” Salah B. Ka’aki, the president and chief executive of Vela, said in the statement. The crew members are citizens of Britain, Poland, Croatia, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia.

Lt. Nathan Christensen, deputy spokesman for the United States Fifth Fleet, said that the tanker had been anchored within sight of the coastal town of Xarardheere. The town is 260 miles north of Mogadishu, the Somali capital, and is part of a region known as a hub of pirate activity.

The hijacking follows a string of increasingly brazen attacks by Somali pirates in recent months, but this appeared to be the first time they have seized an oil tanker. While most of the hijackings have taken place in the Gulf of Aden, which separates Somalia from Yemen, the Saudi tanker was seized hundreds of miles to the south in a vast stretch of open ocean as the tanker headed toward the Cape of Good Hope.

“It is the first attack of its kind in which such a big vessel has been hijacked so far away from the coast,” said Cyrus Mody, the manager of the International Maritime Bureau, a London-based group that monitors global piracy. “It shows that the pirates now have the capability and capacity to sustain themselves in deep sea until the vessel actually comes by.”

If the episode follows the pattern of previous hijackings, ransom negotiations between the pirates and the owners of the ship will begin soon.

The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, called the hijacking “an outrageous act.” In Athens on Tuesday, he said, “Piracy, like terrorism, is a disease which is against everybody, and everybody must address it together.”

Saudi Arabia will join international naval patrols that have begun in the vital shipping lanes near the Red Sea, Prince Faisal said, according to The Associated Press.

This year, 92 ships have been attacked in and around the Gulf of Aden, more than triple the number in 2007, according to the International Maritime Bureau. At least 14 of those ships, carrying more than 250 crew members, are still in the control of hijackers.

An estimated $25 million to $30 million has been paid in ransom to Somali pirates this year, according to a report released Tuesday by Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general. He said that piracy was weakening the Somali government, which has been outgunned and outmaneuvered by the agile pirates.

Many of the captured ships sit a few miles off a 230-mile stretch of Somali coastline between Xarardheere and the town of Eyl, residents of the towns say. A Ukrainian vessel that was hijacked in September, loaded with tanks and other military equipment and weapons, is not far from the Saudi tanker.

Multinational naval vessels began patrolling shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden in August, and they have thwarted two dozen attacks. But the area includes 2.5 million square miles of sea, “and we can’t be everywhere at once,” said Lieutenant Christensen of the Fifth Fleet.

For insurance and safety reasons, most crews on commercial ships do not carry weapons. Nor do many shipowners hire armed contractors to fight or ward off approaching pirates, said Noel Choong, the head of the International Maritime Bureau’s piracy reporting center.

On Tuesday in the Gulf of Aden, pirates seized a cargo ship registered in Hong Kong that was loaded with 36,000 tons of wheat, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported. The ship, with 25 crew members, had been bound for the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas.

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