American-Somali Stand-off Continues while Warships Rush to the Scene

The crew of the hijacked US-American vessel were reported to have retaken control of the ship, but pirates are continuing to hold the ship's captain hostage in a life boat.

Danish owned and US-American operated MV MAERSK ALABAMA, a container ship of 14,120 gross tonnage under US-American flag with a 21 men crew of at least 20 U.S.-American nationals, who are said to be all unharmed according to the company that owns the vessel, had been sea-jacked this morning, April 9, 2009, at 07h30 on the Indian Ocean off the capital of Somalia, Mogadishu and about 280 miles (450 kilometers) south-east of Eyl, a town in the northern Puntland region of Somalia.

The vessel was en route to Mombasa, Kenya, when it was attacked about 500 kilometers (310 miles) off Somalia's coast, the statement issued by Maersk Line Ltd. said. The 20 unarmed crew members fought back against the four hijackers and hours later regained control of their vessel, according to second mate Ken Quinn. Quinn, sounding harried in a terse mobile phone call to CNN, said the crew had released one of the pirates they had tied up for 12 hours. But the hijackers were refusing to return Captain Richard Phillips. "Right now, they want to hold our captain for ransom and we're trying to get him back," Quinn told the US network. "He's in the ship's lifeboat," he said, explaining the four pirates had taken the lifeboat off the Maersk Alabama and that Phillips was in touch with his crew via ship's radio. "So now we're just trying to offer them whatever we can. Food. But it's not working too good." Quinn added: "We have a coalition (vessel) that will be here in three hours. So we're just trying to hold them off for three more hours and then we'll have a warship here to help us." Quinn said that all four pirates were on the lifeboat, after sinking their own boat after they seized the container vessel.

Earlier, the crew took one pirate hostage, trying to swap him for their captain, but the deal went wrong, he told the American CNN news channel. Though the ship is the sixth seized within a week in the dangerous region around Africa, Cmdr. Jane Campbell, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Navy's Bahrain-based 5th Fleet, said it was the first pirate attack "involving U.S. nationals and a U.S.-flagged vessel in recent memory. " No American merchant vessel has been attacked by pirates since 1804 during the North African Barbary Wars.

US-American President Barack Obama's chief spokesman said the White House was assessing a course of action. Press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that officials there monitoring the incident closely. Said Gibbs: "Our top priority is the personal safety of the crew members on board." The White House offered no other immediate details about what actions it was considering.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said there has not yet been any communications from the pirates for ransom. But he would not go into military plans. "I'm not going to speculate on any future military actions," Whitman said, when asked what the U.S. military may do.Whitman said there are still no U.S. Navy ships within view of the vessel, and instead they are still "hundreds of miles away. "The nearest U.S. Navy warship was about 300 nautical miles away at the time of the hijacking," other U.S.-American government sources said. No action has been taken so far, a spokesman for the U.S. military's 5th Fleet in Bahrain said first, according to CNN. "There is a task force present in the region to deter any type of piracy, but the challenge remains that the area is so big and it is hard to monitor all the time," 5th Fleet spokesman Lt. Nathan Christensen said. US Army Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Hibner, a Pentagon spokesperson, said then later on Wednesday that the US Navy destroyer Bainbridge was en route to the scene. The cargo ship is directly owned and operated by a Maersk subsidiary in Norfolk, Virginia, Maersk spokesman Michael Storgaard said. "We have very strict policies on the vessel ... crews are trained to handle these types of situations," Storgaard said from Maersk's headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark. He said the company is in the process of contacting the crew members' relatives and setting up assistance for them.

No ITF agreement regulates the conditions for the sailors on board, but at least 12 of the Americans aboard the Maersk Alabama are members of the Seafarers International Union, spokesman Jordan Biscardo said. The union is trying to get as much information on the situation as it can, he said. "It goes without saying we're deeply concerned and we're closely monitoring the story," Biscardo said. Biscardo would not immediately release the names of the union members aboard the vessel.

The Seafarers International Union represents unlicensed United States merchant mariners sailing aboard U.S.-flag vessels. No action has been taken so far against the pirates, according to a spokesman for the U.S. military's 5th Fleet in Bahrain. "There is a task force present in the region to deter any type of piracy, but the challenge remains that the area is so big and it is hard to monitor all the time," 5th Fleet spokesman Lt. Nathan Christensen said. He said U.S.-flagged ships are not normally escorted by the military, unless they request it from the U.S. Navy.

The 155-metre (511-foot) vessel had been due to dock in the Kenyan port of Mombasa on April 16. The hijacked boxship is run out of the huge merchant and naval base of Norfolk by Maersk Line Ltd., a division of Denmark's A.P. Moller-Maersk Group and was carrying emergency relief to Mombasa, Kenya, when it was hijacked, said Peter Beck-Bang, spokesman for the Copenhagen-based container shipping group A.P. Moller-Maersk, but analysts wondered, since relief food is usually shipped as bulk and not by a rather expensive container-ship. Peter Smerdon, a WFP spokesman in Nairobi, said the cargo included 4,097 tonnes of corn-soya blend which was destined for Somalia and Uganda and 990 tonnes of vegetable oil for refugees in Kenya. He said WFP had 232 containers with mainly the oil out of the 401 on board while the others belonged to USAID, Catholic Relief and [the rather unheard of] Serving God Ministries.

Though the shipping company has had some Defense Department contracts it was said this time not to be on a Pentagon job when attacked, a governmental statement read. The high seas standoff drew an expression of concern from Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, who called on the world to unite to "end the scourge of piracy".

Source: ECOTERRA Intl., April 9, 2009

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