Somali pirates hijack ship; 20 Americans aboard

NAIROBI, Kenya – Somali pirates on Wednesday hijacked a U.S.-flagged cargo ship with 20 American crew members onboard, the shipping company said.
The 17,000-ton Maersk
Alabama 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.
In a statement, the company confirmed that the U.S.-flagged vessel has 20 U.S. nationals onboard.
Cmdr. Jane Campbell, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Navy's
Bahrain-based 5th Fleet, said that it was the first pirate attack
"involving U.S. nationals and a U.S.-flagged vessel in recent memory."
She did not give an exact timeframe.
The U.S.
Navy confirmed that the ship was hijacked Wednesday at 0430GMT (12:30
a.m. EDT) about 280 miles (450 kilometers) southeast of Eyl, a town in
the northern Puntland region of Somalia.
The
ship is the sixth to be seized within a week, a rise that analysts
attribute to a new strategy by Somali pirates who are operating far
from the warships patrolling the Gulf of Aden.
U.S. Navy spokesman Lt. Nathan Christensen said the closest U.S. ship at the time of the hijacking was 345 miles away.
"The
area, the ship was taken in, is not where the focus of our ships has
been," Christensen told The Associated Press on the phone from the 5th
Fleet's Mideast headquarters in Bahrain.
"The
area we're patrolling is more than a million miles in size. Our ships
cannot be everywhere at every time," Christensen said.
When
asked how the U.S. Navy plans to deal with this, Campbell said: "It's
fair to say we are closely monitoring the situation, but we will not
discuss nor speculate on current and future military operations."
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.
Most
hijackings end with million-dollar payouts. Piracy is considered the
biggest moneymaker in Somalia, a country that has had no stable
government for decades. Roger Middleton, a piracy expert at the
London-based think-tank Chatham House, said pirates took up to $80
million in ransoms last year.
This is the
second time that Somali pirates have seized a ship belonging to the
privately held shipping group A.P. Moller-Maersk. In February 2008, the
towing vessel Svitzer Korsakov from the A.P. Moller-Maersk company
Svitzer was briefly seized by pirates.
Before this latest hijacking, Somali pirates were holding 14 vessels and about 200 crew members, according to the International Maritime Bureau.
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Associated
Press writers Barbara Surk in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Jan M. Olsen
in Copenhagen; and Tom Maliti and Anita Powell in Nairobi, Kenya
contributed to this report.