Somali pirates holding a huge oil-laden Saudi tanker yesterday vowed to fight back should any assault be attempted to free the ship and urged its owners to pay up a US$25 million ransom.
As world powers rushed naval forces to Somalia’s dangerous waters amid growing concerns of major disruptions in international trade, the pirates consolidated their land base with more men and weapons.
Speaking to journalists from the pirate lair of Harardhere, a member of the group holding the Sirius Star said there was no plan to destroy the supertanker or harm its crew but warned any military bid to free it would be “disastrous.”
PHOTO: AP
“I hope the owner of the tanker is wise enough and won’t allow any military option because that would be disastrous for everybody. We are here to defend the tanker if attacked,” Abdiyare Moalim said.
“Their intention is clear, I was speaking to them some minutes ago and they told me they are not going to destroy the ship or harm the crew. They are hoping to get what they demanded,” he said from Harardhere, north of Mogadishu.
Local residents said that reinforcements of at least 10 well-armed men joined the pirates on the ship, which anchored off Harardhere with its 25 crew three days after being hijacked on Nov. 15.
“Early this morning, I saw at least 10 heavily armed pirates heading to the ship. Their boat returned after dropping them off,” local fisherman Hassan Ahmed said.
Residents said clan militias and Islamist fighters had arrived in the village and its surroundings over the past two or three days.
The Islamist Shebab group that control much of Somalia has repeatedly stated it was fiercely opposed to piracy, which in Islamic law is a capital offense, and has vowed to root out pirates.
But an Islamist official in Harardhere said the Shebab fighters in the region had no intention of attacking the pirate group and residents said that greed was the only explanation for the coastal hamlet’s recent crowding.
The Sirius Star, the biggest ship ever hijacked, and its US$100 million load of oil was seized on Nov. 15 and taken three days later to Harardhere, 300km north of Somalia’s capital Mogadishu.
The pirates on Thursday gave the owners 10 days to pay a US$25 million ransom, said a pirate who identified himself as Mohamed Said, threatening “disastrous” consequences if Vela International, shipping arm of the Saudi oil giant Saudi Aramco, failed to comply.
He did not specify the threatened action but the 330m long tanker is carrying 2 million barrels of crude oil.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS