Greek tanker's crew fights off pirate attack
NAIROBI, Kenya — Using flares and hoses, the crew of a Greek oil tanker fought off a pirate attack Tuesday in the Arabian Sea, two days after brigands seized a tanker bound for the United States with $20 million of crude oil.
Pirates fired automatic weapons at the Sikinos and its crew some 500 miles southeast of Oman, according to a Greek coast guard statement. The 24-man crew fired flares and used high-pressure hoses to repel the attack, and the vessel continued toward China. The crew was unhurt in the attack.
The attack came two days after the tanker Maran Centaurus was seized by pirates. It is now headed toward Somalia’s coast.
The attacks highlight the difficulty of keeping ships safe in the region — particularly oil tankers.
It’s too soon to say whether pirates are going after the softer targets, which must travel at slower speeds and don’t use armed security personnel, a U.S. Navy official said.
"I’m not going to speculate on any trend based on these two [incidents]," Lt. Matthew Allen, a spokesman with U.S. Naval Forces Central Command/5th Fleet told Stars and Stripes.
Crews on oil tankers aren’t allowed to smoke above deck, much less carry guns, for fear of igniting the ship’s payload.
The Maran Centaurus — traveling from Kuwait to New Orleans — had no escort because naval warships patrolling off the Horn of Africa are stretched too thin. The problem has been further exacerbated by pirates operating hundreds of miles out at sea and using mother ships for their skiffs.
Pirates who hijacked the Maran Centaurus had not made any ransom demands as of Tuesday, said Pat Adamson, spokesman for Maran Tankers Management Inc. "They just told the captain to call the office to say the crew was well and they were heading to Hobyo [Somalia]," he said Tuesday in a phone interview.
The main focus of the European Union Naval Force Somalia — launched in 2008 to conduct military operations to help deter, prevent and repress acts of piracy — has been to aid vessels primarily transiting the Gulf of Aden, spokesman British Cmdr. John Harbour said.
"We’re working with 16 other nations with at least 30 ships in the area doing a huge job in a huge stretch of ocean," Harbour said. "About 25,000 ships pass through that area each year, only about 50 are hijacked, so the odds are, ships won’t be hijacked."
Yet, as of Tuesday, pirates held 11 hijacked ships and roughly 250 crewmembers hostage, Allen said.
"This is a terrible thing, horrible for the profession," said Moses Calouro, general manager for Maritime Global Net, a shipping industry communication company used by roughly 80,000 people in the commercial business. "These guys are trained to pump oil and navigate vessels, not fight pirates."
For Calouro, "it’s obvious" that oil tankers are a key target for pirates: They’re slow-moving, carry costly cargos, sit lower in the ocean and therefore are easier to board, and crews aren’t likely to carry live weapons onboard, he said.
The Maran Centaurus is carrying around 275,000 metric tons of crude, said Stavros Hadzigrigoris, from the ship’s owners Maran Tankers Management. At current market rates, the oil would be worth just over $20 million.
Some ships, like the one that fought off the attack Tuesday, have been outfitted with high-pressure water guns and piercing noisemakers to repel pirates. But even this is shunned on many oil tankers for fear of triggering a response from pirates armed with guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
"If you’re not allowed to smoke a cigarette on the upper deck of an oil tanker, why would you want someone with a weapon up there?" said Graeme Gibbon-Brooks, who heads the private security company Dryad Maritime Intelligence.
Nearly 20 percent of global shipping — including 8 percent of global oil shipments — is funneled into the narrow, pirate-infested Gulf of Aden that leads through the Red Sea to the Suez Canal. The route is bordered on one side by the failed state of Somalia and on the other by the increasingly unstable country of Yemen.
Somalia’s lawless 1,880-mile coastline has become a pirate haven. The impoverished Horn of Africa nation has not had a functioning government for a generation and the weak U.N.-backed administration is too busy fighting an Islamist insurgency to go after pirates.
The Saudi-owned Sirius Star was hijacked a year ago, leading to heightened international efforts to fight piracy off the Horn of Africa. That hijacking ended with a $3 million ransom payment.
Stars and Stripes reporters Sandra Jontz and Lisa Novak contributed to this story.
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