Word: aden
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...more difficult than boarding a moving bus," says Vikas Kapoor, a former chief officer on a Hong Kong-registered container ship, of the frequent hijackings he witnessed and heard of in the Gulf of Aden during his stint onboard last year. "The pirates come at you firing rocket launchers. You can outpace them if you're a fast, high-decked container. Otherwise you'll have to slow down or risk being blown up. Then they'll bring out their ladders, climb onto your deck, guns in hand, and it's all over in seven to eight minutes." Describing the passage...
...amount of education required. Even amid the present economic gloom, officers' salaries have not plunged due to a shortage of qualified people. Indians and Filipinos are most in demand on international vessels because they speak English. But many Indian seafarers are now refusing to do the Gulf of Aden run. "Sailors are very apprehensive, very jerky," says Sunil Nair, spokesman for the Mumbai-based National Union of Seafarers of India (NUSI), which has some 80,000 members. He says that since the spate of hijackings last year - when there were 72 attacks and 52 hijackings - more sailors who switch companies...
...negotiations between the pirates and the ship's owners, and the crew was released for an undisclosed ransom, believed to be much lower than the $6 million the pirates had initially demanded. At the same time, the Indian navy sent a warship, the INS Tabar, to the Gulf of Aden - for the first time deploying a warship in an offensive role in international waters. For close to 20 days, the INS Tabar escorted some 35 ships to safety, including non-Indian-flagged vessels, but it accidentally shot down a hijacked Thai trawler that it mistook for a pirate mother ship...
...pirates, largely from lawless coastal Somali towns, have basically turned the heavily traveled route through the Gulf of Aden into a toll road that shippers' insurance firms have been willing to pay for (up to $3 million for a single vessel). About 20,000 merchant ships traverse the waterway each year; there have already been 74 attacks and 15 hijackings in 2009, compared with 111 attacks last year. The pirates generally want cash, not trouble. They've treated their hostages well, and violence has been rare. All of that changed, of course, last week when a quartet of Somalis seized...
...Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged on Monday that rescuing hostages - in this case, Navy snipers took out Phillips' three captors - is only a stopgap way of dealing with the pirates now sailing the Gulf of Aden. "There is no purely military solution to it," Gates told an audience of the Marine Corps War College in Quantico, Va. "It is a serious international problem, and it's probably going to get worse." (See pictures of the U.S. and France fighting the Somali pirates...