Somali pirates hijack Saudi oil tanker
 

This is the first I have heard about this.

It used to be the Strait of Malacca was the pirate hot spot of the word, but the Somalis are really catching up.

At least this tanker only has oil and isn't carrying 33 tanks and grenade launchers like the MV Faina the pirates captured a month ago.

Thanks glatt - I see the anchor chain is in the water there, I wonder if that pic was before, during or after the highjack.

The pictures above are from the last major attack, not this oil tanker. You would have to be foolish to stop in pirate infested waters if you were a sea captain. I guess it's just speed boats and grappling hooks that allow these pirates to capture a ship while underway. That and sleeping night watchmen. So I think the pirates dropped the anchor.

Mostly, the pirates take valuables from the crew and leave the cargo alone. It's surprising they are going to try to steal the oil cargo in this tanker. Do they have the infrastructure to store that oil? Are they going to just sell it off dock side in 5 gallon jerry cans? I don't know how that works.

Piracy is making a comeback eh? Who's down to bring back train robberies with me!

Hmm- I'll be out of the country with Slang and UG, maybe when we get back we could knock a few off the tracks.

Unless these pirates show proof of citizen to a country who actually wants to protect them, we should be blowing these guys away left and right. Good sport for Navy SEALs I would think. Make an example of one ship, distribute leaflets with pictures of it to every other hijacked ship and tell em surrender your weapons and leave in under 2 hours or we will fuck you up just like these guys. No negotiations, no quarter for those who choose to stay and fight. Scum who prey on total civilians deserve nothing less.
:sniper:

i was thinking that we should buy the shipments from the pirates at cut rates, myself.

But the shipping would be a killer.

:lol2:

Piracy off the Somalia coast has been routine for years. What makes this event unique was the size of the ship AND that it occurred about 450 nautical miles offshore.

Discussed previously in another thread and this from the NY Times:

What the hell do they do once they seize the ship anyway? How do they get the cargo or whatever off - especially this oil tanker?

Isn't this why they invented submarines? To torpedo pirate ships and watch as the crew is devoured by sharks, or am I thinking of something else?

Kinda reminds me of this.

They hold it for ransom from the owner or insurance company.
The problem with attacking them is the hostages.

The ships are always held for ransom. Somalia has no refineries. No way to offload the oil. I don't even know if that port is deep enough for a tanker that deep.

A fleet of international warships operate a protective screen off Somalia. So how did they get this ship? They highjacked it off of Kenya. Also possible that warships never knew the highjacking occurred until that tanker was in a northern Somalian port.

Curious is the military comment on how professional these pirates are.

Pirates seize 7 ships in 12 days, latest from Iran

(AP:MOGADISHU, Somalia) Somali pirates hijacked their seventh ship in 12 days on Tuesday, as the U.S. Navy reported that pirates had seized an Iranian cargo ship in the Gulf of Aden. The status of the crew or the cargo was not known, she said.

Elsewhere, pirates anchored a hijacked Saudi supertanker loaded with $100 million in crude oil off the Somali coast on Tuesday, causing residents in impoverished fishing villages to gawk in amazement at the size of the 1,080 foot (329 meter) tanker.

Pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia have surged recently, despite the presence of NATO ships, U.S. warships and a Russian frigate all working to prevent piracy in one of the world's busiest shipping lanes.

International Maritime Bureau on Sunday reported five hijackings since Nov. 7, before the hijackings of the Saudi ship or the Iranian ship were announced.

With few other options, shipowners in past piracy cases have ended up paying ransoms for their ships, cargoes and crew.

The U.S. and other naval forces decided against intervention for now. NATO said it would not divert any of its three warships from the Gulf of Aden and the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet also said it did not expect to send ships to try to intercept the Saudi supertanker, the MV Sirius Star. The tanker was seized over the weekend about 450 nautical miles off the Kenyan coast.

Never before have Somali pirates seized such a giant ship so far out to sea _ and never a vessel so large. The captors of the Sirius Star anchored the ship, with a full load of 2 million barrels of oil and 25 crew members, close to a main pirate den on the Somali coast, Harardhere.

~~~~~~~~~
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal called the hijacking "an outrageous act" and said "piracy, like terrorism, is a disease which is against everybody, and everybody must address it together."

Speaking during a visit to Athens on Tuesday, he said Saudi Arabia would join an international initiative against piracy in the Red Sea area, where more than 80 pirate attacks have taken place this year.

He did not elaborate on what steps the kingdom would take to better protect its vital oil tankers. Saudi Arabia's French-equipped navy has 18,000-20,000 personnel, but has never taken part in any high-seas fighting.

Meanwhile, the Norwegian shipping group Odjell SE said it ordered its more than 90 tankers to sail all the way around Africa to avoid the risk of attack by Somali pirates. That means ships will go past South Africa's Cape of Good Hope instead of taking the Suez Canal shortcut through the Gulf of Aden.

"We will no longer expose our crew to the risk of being hijacked and held for ransom by pirates in the Gulf of Aden," said Terje Storeng, Odjell's president and chief executive.

Experts say the much longer journey adds 12 to 15 days to a tanker's trip, at a cost of between $20,000-$30,000 a day.


The U.S. Navy is still surrounding a Ukrainian ship loaded with tanks and other weaponry that was seized by pirates Sept. 25 off the Somali coast.

Sounds like they need to send some SEALs or other SOF to the area and screw those fellas like they have never been screwed before. It would really suck to be them if they took on a US flagged ship.

Instead they took a British crewed ship.

TW, the ship was owned by a Saudi company and registered in Liberia. There were two Brits on board. You're hearing about this precisely for that reason, via British media. The UK is almost as insular as the US (except our ties to mainland Europe).

Forget the other ships captured by pirates this year - this is headline news here because two Brits are working on board.

It's also news because it's been attacked away from the blockade in Somalia, and is off the coast of Kenya. But never believe it would have been in our newspapers if not for the two Brits.

Brother, I know the SAS. If they hit a Brit flagged ship it would be the last one they hit.

Now the numbers. I believe 30 ships per year are highjacked. A fleet of maybe five frigates (including one from Russia) are on patrol off Somalia.

Boy, you guys sure lost your enthusiasm since talk like a pirate day.

Has anyone (else) here read The Devil's Alternative, by Fredrick Forsyth? It deals with a hijacked super tanker.

Clearly, mere regular patrols aren't working. Counter-strikes against seized ships kill hostages and in this case would either destroy, or dump into the sea, a huge amount of oil.
Two tactical responses seem like they might work: providing escorts for ships in convoy, or setting a few decoy/sting ships that look like nice easy targets but turn out to have, say, a whole commando regiment on board.

Pirates hijack another

The Indian Navy scores a mothership

Johnny Depp does a few popular movies about pirates. Now everybody wants to be one.

As ill-equipped as Somali pirates are, a commando raid on the Sirius Star would doubtless get it back. Once the ship has been retaken, there will be very damned little anyone in Somalia could do about it, and a marine diesel engine is quicker to start than a steam turbine powerplant. The cost of mounting such an effort and getting it on-target would probably be about what ransoming the vessel and crew would be -- with substantial added benefits. too readily imagined to need recapitulating here.

The vessel is not loaded with anything remarkably volatile: it's about half to two thirds loaded with crude oil, which is no easier to light off than diesel. The likelihood of the ship being wired for demolition charges seems to me small.

And if the Somali pirates find they can't use crewmen as human shields to any effect to keep the ship, it will discourage them. In general, the only reason the Somali pirates are having the successes they're gaining is because merchant shipping is even worse equipped, and even less trained, for fighting than the Somalis.

I think the Somalis should be discouraged.

I'm not keen on Ethiopia taking over Somalia to restore order -- but the reason Ethiopia has that big horn-shape into that general area in its southeast is because Ethiopia, of all countries, took it away from Somalia back in the day. They are, well, available, and local, and so would have a deeper local understanding. It's probably as true, though, that Ethiopia isn't all that keen on it either, having shall we say a remarkably small merchant marine and thus not being much affected by Somali depredation.

UG, I wish you hadn't posted that.

All Somali pirates read the Cellar.

Yeah, dammit, the cellar hunting trip was just a cover. We were going to go in tonight to take them out, until you blew it. Good one. ;)

Loose lips sink ... er ... fail to liberate ... ships.

An interesting twist on things.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...to-attack.html

Another update:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...efer=worldwide

I think that its fairly remarkable that these pirates are even able to get on a gigantic ship that is underway, let alone seize it.

It seems to me that this sort of thing should be relatively easy to prevent.

Unarmed, untrained and probably surprised... it took 16 minutes. :(

I picked up an interesting tidbit on NPR the other day. They blamed the problem on the lack of government but the state gun control aspect of this is interesting. The pirates could easily be repelled but crews can't carry weapons if they're going through certain territorial waters. So instead of handing out 20 sidearms on a ship, taxpayers will be paying for destroyers to patrol a million square miles of ocean.

I didn't understand the legality thing myself. Most large ships, including cruise ships have a small number of weapons on hand. I just don't see why they couldn't increase the number of weapons. There are now some ex-SBS guys who are going to offer their services in the form of a commercial organization to provide security to the shipping industry. I am sure it will be cheaper than the ransoms being paid, but costly never the less. As Iraq dries up there will be more private security available for lease.

I like that idea. Keep the Blackwaters of the world in other countries and out of ours.

I want to know, as Bullitt does, why no one has gone to China Station or anywhere else ex-Special Forces hang out and hired a few teams to repatriate their ship(s). SEALs are well-trained for this kind of thing and would have little trouble taking a bunch of untrained pirates. SAS and Spetznaz are in the same league.

Protecting the ships is easy, too. Stinger missiles, RPG-7 launchers and such are cheap, easily available and untraceable. As long as the weapons are not visible to inspectors (easy to hide), you're home free.

Were I the owner of a hijacked ship, that's what I'd do...arm the crew and salt a few Special Operators among them for good measure.

I'd load my ship up with herpetic, gonorrheic whores. Everyone knows a pirate cannot resist a whore. In a few weeks, they'd be begging for ointments, salves, unguents, cold-compresses, Darvocet and what-not. That's where the real money will be made: treating the STD's of the pirate caste.

I dunno, there's a good chance they already have AIDS. ;)

Second. I am sure we are not the first to think of it. It would be a great exercise for the SSN North Carolina or a similar boat to exercise the capability of delivering a SEAL team unseen.

Turns out the "mother ship" wasn't really a mother ship and was a Thai fishing trawler that the pirates had attacked just hours earlier and were still in the process of trying to take over. The fishermen on that trawler were resisting the pirates in one part of the trawler when the Indian Navy came up and blew them out of the water. Over a dozen Thai fishermen are missing because of that Indian Naval action. One survived the Navy attack and drifted at sea for days and has just told his tale.

I guess this is why fighting pirates is so hard. The collateral damage is hard to avoid.

Jesus, that's horrible.

Hmmm - good story if you are a pirate arrrgggghhh. What else can he say to get off?
That sux! Of course if that was the US we'd be getting badmouthed from everyone about it.

Oh and another got hijacked too.

Did your hypothetical feelings get hurt?

That would explain why The Economist kept listing it as an 'alleged' pirate ship.

lol @ the Griffster

Yea, looks like everyone is a potential victim of the propaganda machine. Even you fell for it...

link

Got to stop paying them.

Bit of an "oops" there, but still, they must have taken out a few pirates with it.

Here's a map of the pirate attacks, courtesy of the BBC:
Attachment 20529

Read a thing yesterday that pointed out that most civilized countries have an interest in seeing the piracy continue.

The pirates are enemies of the very Islamic government of Somalia. It's recognized as a state sponsor of terrorism and not interested in rule of law. Western business interests are slightly affected but not very much. The best thing that could happen is if the Somalian government would just go away, but to have this boil on its ass is not a bad thing.

From The Economist of 20 Nov 2008: A dumb American president advocated a solution without even understannding the problem. Current government is protecting those pirates? The current government supported by the American proxy - Ethiopia - is as powerless as the plan that put them there. Another George Jr trophy.

How many American flagged carriers are at risk? Maybe the Liberian Navy should be provide a solution?

I nominate you to go deal with them tw. I think you can really do it. and if not, eh, whatever.

Don't worry. You repeatedly supported and voted for the president that god talks to. So there is no problem. Obviously piracy will not exist as soon as this president talks to god. Clearly the president and god have simply been too busy. But don't worry. Be happy. God is on our side. George Jr said so.

Good come back Twat. Just remember, I may be drunk but in the morning I'll be sober but you'll still be you.

This Saturday's South Carolina primary could make or break Barack Obama's presidential aspirations. The Illinois Senator was interviewed by phone on Monday by Beliefnet politics editor Dan Gilgoff....

..."The prayer that I tell myself every night is a fairly simple one: I ask in the name of Jesus Christ that my sins are forgiven, that my family is protected and that I am an instrument of God's will. I'm constantly trying to align myself to what I think he calls on me to do. And sometimes you hear it strongly and sometimes that voice is more muted.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/0...i_n_82737.html

WTF? The guys were the security..

Three British ship security guards escaped kidnapping yesterday by jumping into the sea as Somali pirates hijacked a Singaporean tanker in the Gulf of Aden – the latest in a soaring spate of attacks.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...f-Somalia.html

Go easy, Merc, they're just doing what corporate execs would do in the same situation.

Actually, the execs would have a velvet-lined life-boat on standby.

They bailed. :D

French warship captures 19 Somali pirates
Its a start anyway....