MOMBASA, Kenya: Somali pirates captured four more ships and took more than 60 crew members hostage in a brazen hijacking spree, while the American captain who escaped their grip planned to reunite with his crew and fly home today to the United States.
Capt. Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama has been hailed as a hero for offering himself up as a hostage to save his crew. In a dramatic rescue, US Navy SEALs shot three pirates dead Sunday night to free Phillips after a five-day standoff.
Phillips and his 19-man crew will reunite in the Kenyan port of Mombasa today and fly from there to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on a chartered flight, according to the shipping company Maersk. They will be reunited with loved ones at Andrews in a private reception area.
Pirates have vowed to retaliate for five colleagues slain by US and French forces in hostage rescues in the last week, and the top US military officer said yesterday he takes those comments seriously.
But Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that “we’re very well prepared to deal with anything like that.”
Despite Mullen’s confident statement and President Barack Obama’s warning of further US action, Somali pirates captured two more nautical trophies yesterday to match the two ships they seized a day earlier. The latest seizures were the Lebanese-owned cargo ship MV Sea Horse, the Greek-managed bulk carrier MV Irene E.M. and two Egyptian fishing boats. Maritime officials said the Irene carried up to 23 Filipino crew and the International Maritime Bureau reported 36 fishermen, all believed to be Egyptian, on the two boats.
It was not known exactly how many crew the Sea Horse had, but a ship that size would probably need at least a dozen sailors.
NATO spokeswoman Shona Lowe said pirates in three or four speedboats captured the Sea Horse off Somalia’s eastern coast yesterday, hours after the Irene was seized in a rare overnight raid in the nearby Gulf of Aden.
The two Egyptian fishing boats were hijacked on Somalia’s northern coast on Monday.
The Gulf of Aden, which links the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, is one of the world’s busiest and most vital shipping lanes, crossed by over 20,000 ships each year. It has been at the center of the world’s fight against piracy.
A flotilla of warships from nearly a dozen countries has patrolled the Gulf of Aden and nearby Indian Ocean waters for months. They have halted many attacks on ships this year, but say the area is so vast they can’t stop all hijackings.
Pirates have attacked 78 ships this year, hijacking 19 of them. Seventeen ships with over 300 crew still remain in pirates’ hands, according to Noel Choong, who heads the International Maritime Bureau’s piracy reporting center in Kuala Lumpur.
