WASHINGTON — As per
breaking news, 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.
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.
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.
But by 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 the company that 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.”
Maersk Line Ltd., based in Norfolk, Va., is one of the Defense Department’s primary shipping contractors, although it 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 crew members, who are generally unarmed.
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.
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