April 8th, 2009
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CNN
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-- Pirates attacked a U.S. cargo ship off the coast of Somalia carrying food aid to East Africa and may have hijacked the vessel, which was carrying 20 American crew members, according to the company that owns the vessel.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the Obama administration is aware of the situation.
"The White House is closely monitoring the apparent hijacking of the U.S.-flagged ship in the Indian Ocean and assessing a course of action to resolve this situation," Gibbs said. "Our top priority is the personal safety of the crew members on board."
The U.S.-flagged Maersk Alabama was en route to Mombasa, Kenya, when it was attacked about 500 kilometers (310 miles) off Somalia's coast, according to a statement from Maersk Line Ltd.
The company said it believes the vessel may have been hijacked. If so, it would be the sixth hijacking over the past week.
The ship was attacked about 7:30 a.m. when the nearest U.S. Navy warship was about 300 nautical miles away, goverment sources said. On Tuesday, the U.S. Navy warned mariners that pirates were attacking ships extending hundreds of miles offshore.
The cargo ship is owned and operated by a Maersk subsidiary in Norfolk, Virginia, Maersk spokesman Michael Storgaard said. He would not provide any details about the security arrangements on board the Maersk Alabama.
"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 contacting the crew members' relatives and setting up assistance for them.
"That is at this moment our primary concern," Storgaard said. Watch as Maersk spokesman talks of the hijacking »
The Norfolk-based Maersk Line is one of the Department of Defense's primary shipping contractors, but the Maersk Alabama was not under the Pentagon's contract at the time of the attack, according to Lt. Nathan Christensen, a spokesman for the U.S. military's 5th Fleet in Bahrain.
The Maersk Alabama is 155 meters (508 feet) long and 25 meters (82 feet) wide. It was built in 1998.
The vessel was carrying food aid to East Africa, including shipments from the United Nations' World Food Program, a Maersk statement said.
No action has been taken against the pirates, Christensen said.
"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," he said. "The area we patrol is over a million square miles. We can't be everywhere at once."
He said U.S.-flagged ships are not usually escorted by the U.S. Navy unless they request it. See how pirate attacks have increased »
Pirates are changing their tactics and taking advantage of tens of thousands of square miles of open water where fewer military ships patrol, according to U.S. military officials.
Recent attacks off Somalia's coast have taken place south of the area patrolled by U.S. and coalition ships.
"They [pirates] are going where we are not, they are looking for targets where there is limited coalition presence," according to a U.S. military briefing document shown to CNN.
Coalition ships mainly patrol in the busy sea lanes of the Gulf of Aden between Yemen and northern Somalia as ships come out of and head toward the mouth of the Red Sea.
Navy officials say about 12 to 15 coalition ships are patrolling in the Gulf of Aden.
"Despite increased naval presence in the region, ships and aircraft are unlikely to be close enough to provide support to vessels under attack. The scope and magnitude of the problem cannot be understated," according to a news release from the U.S. Navy.
Between January and February, only two pirate attacks off Somalia were reported, according to the International Maritime Bureau, which tracks piracy attacks worldwide.
In March, attacks in the same area spiked to 15, according to the bureau, and the attacks have continued into April.
On Monday, pirates seized a British-owned cargo ship in the Gulf of Aden. Also on Monday, a fishing trawler was hijacked and used to hijack other fishing vessels, the bureau said.
Pentagon officials say pirates are holding 15 ships off the Somali coast. According to U.S. Navy statistics, pirates attacked four ships between Saturday and Monday.
Pirates typically use small boats with a limited range to attack ships just a few miles off the coastline.
The new warning says pirates are striking ships hundreds of miles off the coast, suggesting that they are using more "mother ships" -- bigger boats with longer range -- to launch smaller pirate ships farther out to sea, according to Pentagon officials.
The U.S. Department of Transportation's Maritime Liaison Office also warned mariners on April 1 that ships traveling along the coast of Somalia and Kenya should move to the east side of the Seychelles Islands and Madagascar, hundreds of miles east of those coastlines.
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