US crew reportedly takes over ship from pirates

WASHINGTON – The crew of a US-flagged ship seized by pirates off Somalia is believed to have retaken the vessel, the Pentagon said yesterday, even as a shaken national security establishment confronted troubling questions about the hostage-taking at high sea.

Captain Joseph Murphy, an instructor at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, told The Associated Press the Department of Defence that his son Shane, the second in command on the ship, had called him to say the crew had regained control.’The crew is back in control of the ship,’ a US official said at midday, speaking on condition of anonymity because she was not authorised to speak on the record. ‘It’s reported that one pirate is on board under crew control – the other three were trying to flee,’ the official said. The status of the other pirates was unknown, the official said, but they were reported to ‘be in the water.’The crew apparently contacted the private shipping that it works for. That company, Maersk, scheduled a noon news conference in Norfolk, Virginia defence officials said.Somali pirates yesterday a US-flagged cargo ship with 20 American crew members onboard, hundreds of miles from the nearest American military vessel in some of the most dangerous waters in the world.The 17 000-ton Maersk Alabama was carrying emergency relief to Mombasa, Kenya, when it was hijacked, said Peter Beck-Bang, spokesman for the Copenhagen-based container shipping group AP Moller-Maersk. It was the sixth ship seized within a week, a rise that analysts attribute to a new strategy by Somali pirates who are operating far from the warships patrolling the Gulf of Aden.The company confirmed that the US-flagged vessel has 20 US nationals onboard.Commander Jane Campbell, a spokeswoman for the US Navy’s Bahrain-based 5th Fleet, said that it was the first pirate attack ‘involving U.S. nationals and a US-flagged vessel in recent memory.’ She did not give an exact timeframe.When asked how the US Navy plans to deal with the hijacking, Campbell said: ‘It’s fair to say we are closely monitoring the situation, but we will not discuss nor speculate on current and future military operations.’It was not clear whether the pirates knew they were hijacking a ship with American crew.’It’s a very significant foreign policy challenge for the Obama administration,’ said Graeme Gibbon Brooks, managing director of the British company Dryad Maritime Intelligence Service Ltd. ‘Their citizens are in the hands of criminals and people are waiting to see what happens.’Before this latest hijacking, Somali pirates were holding 14 vessels and about 200 crew members, according to the International Maritime Bureau. – Nampa-AP