Word: ship
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Western military deployments are certainly having an impact in the area. Last weekend British marines attacked a Yemeni-flagged fishing vessel that had unsuccessfully attacked a Danish container ship. Eight pirates were arrested and turned over to the Kenyan authorities in what Britain's Armed Forces Minister Bob Ainsworth said was a "strong message to pirates that their activities are unacceptable and that the global community is united in its efforts to deter and disrupt them...
...Somali coast. International navies have been protecting a narrow corridor farther north toward the Gulf of Aden, but this seizure demonstrates the pirates' dramatically expanded reach. Two, the buccaneers have never taken over an oil supertanker, capable of carrying 2 million barrels of oil. It is the biggest ship ever seized by the pirates. U.S. Navy officers say the ship appears to be heading toward the Somali port of Eyl, a harbor where the pirates often park their plunder while negotiations proceed. Meanwhile, pirates are holding 14 other vessels and their crews hostage for ransom off the coast of Somalia...
...ships aren't too difficult to capture. Commercial shippers - and many ports - generally frown upon if not ban crews from carrying weapons. So when bands of pirates approach a target ship at high speed with machine guns and RPGs blazing, there's little fighting back that the crew can do. Reports to the International Maritime Bureau on hijackings detail crews using water shot from fire hoses, evasive maneuvers that sometimes generate waves to keep the pirates at bay and "Mayday" calls to other ships as the key defenses against pirates...
...such efforts fail, there's little for the crew to do but watch the pirates use grappling hooks and rope ladders to climb aboard and take them hostage. "The crews [of the captured ships] are not exorbitantly large," Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Monday. (That's an understatement: the supertanker's crew of 25 runs a ship three times the size of a Nimitz-class U.S. carrier, which is manned by 3,200 sailors, not including the 2,500 responsible for flying and maintaining its aircraft.) "So once they have access," Mullen added, "they...
...into a toll road. But as the pirates are becoming more brazen, the international community's patience is running out. "Right now, it's just cheaper to pay the ransom," says Zinni, who led the pullout of U.N. troops from Somalia in 1995. "But just wait until a cruise ship gets taken down and there's some sort of miscalculation and a bunch of people get killed...