Somali pirates hijacked a Saudi Aramco crude tanker on November 15 some 450 nautical miles southeast of Mombasa, Kenya.
The US Navy said yesterday that the pirates were approaching a Somali port with ‘Sirius Star’ and her crew of 25. The crew who come from Britain, Croatia, Poland, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia, are all said to be in good health. While Navies from various countries including USA and Russia have been patrolling the area of the Gulf of Aden piracy hot spot due to the outbreak of piracy in recent times, Graeme Gibbon Brooks, managing director of Dryad Maritime Intelligence Service told that there would never be enough warships to patrol the entire area. "The whole area is 2.5 million square miles,” he said. The ‘Sirius Star’ is the largest ship ever hijacked by Somali pirates, and the 318,000DWT tanker is capable of carrying up to two million barrels of oil. However, the US Navy Fifth Fleet Commander Jane Campbell told that the Navy was unlikely to dispatch an aide vessel to the tanker, because it did not have weapons on board, like the Ukrainian ship ‘Faina’ which was seized by Somali pirates in September.
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