 |
| |
WEEKLY
SECTIONS |
 |
|
 |
| US warships fire at Somali pirates |
|
|
|
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
MOGADISHU: US warships fired on Somali pirates trying to re-supply colleagues who had hijacked a Dutch-owned tugboat, a district commissioner said on Monday.
“Some of the artillery shells hit around the coastline but no human casualties were reported. Unfortunately the gangs escaped,” Abdullahi Said, the district commissioner for Eyl told The Associated Press by phone. The hijacked ship, which had six crewmembers onboard, is stationed around 40-km east of Eyl, he added.
All crew members on the Svitzer Korsakov tugboat a British captain, an Irish engineer and four Russian crew were believed to be unharmed. A spokeswoman for the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, which oversees operations off the pirate-infested Somali coast, said she had not heard about the incident. But Denise Garcia, the spokeswoman, said the US Navy had been monitoring the ship since it was seized on Feb 4 off the coast of Punt land, a semiautonomous region of northeast Somalia. She said US warships had communicated with the pirates by radio and “encouraged them to leave the ship and let it go.”
The US Navy has led international patrols to try to combat piracy in the region. In one incident last year, the guided missile destroyer USS Porter opened fire to destroy pirate skiffs tied to a Japanese tanker. Piracy is increasingly common along Somalia’s 1,880-mile coast, which is the longest in Africa and near key shipping routes connecting the Red Sea with the Indian Ocean.
|
|
|
| Back
| Send
this story to Friend | Print
Version |
|
|
|
ISSN 1563-9479 
