Somali pirates hijacked a Saudi Aramco crude oil tanker last Saturday (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. The 318,000DWT 'Sirius Star' is the largest ship ever hijacked by Somali pirates
While navies from various countries including the USA and Russia have been patrolling the Gulf of Aden due to the outbreak of piracy in recent times, Graeme Gibbon Brooks, managing director of Dryad Maritime Intelligence Service told the UK's The Telegraph that there would never be enough warships to patrol the entire 2.5 million square mile area.
"This is unprecedented," Lt Nathan Christensen, a spokesman for the US Fifth Fleet was quoted as saying in The Telegraph. "It's the largest ship that we've seen pirated. It's three times the size of an aircraft carrier." However, the US Navy Fifth Fleet Commander Jane Campbell told CNN the Navy was unlikely to dispatch an aid 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.