Monday, November 30, 2009
The Greek-flagged ship — traveling from Saudi Arabia to New Orleans — had no escort when it was hijacked Sunday because naval warships are stretched thin and the pirates have expanded their operations to hundreds of miles out at sea.
Crews on oil tankers aren't allowed to smoke above deck, much less carry guns, for fear of igniting the ship's payload. That's one of the main reasons Somali pirates met little resistance when they hijacked the ship.
The hijacking, one year after the seizure of a Saudi supertanker led to heightened international efforts to fight piracy off the Horn of Africa, has highlighted the difficulty of keeping ships safe in the region — particularly oil tankers.
The Maran Centaurus and its 28 crewmembers were about 800 miles off the coast of Somalia when the ship was hijacked, said Cmdr. John Harbour, a spokesman for the European Union Naval Force. Monday, it headed toward Somalia's lawless coast, where pirates probably will hold the vessel as they try to negotiate a multimillion-dollar ransom.
Some ships traveling in the region have been outfitted with high-pressure water guns and piercing noisemakers to repel pirates, but even these measures are shunned on oil tankers for fear of triggering a response from pirates armed with guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
"If you're not allowed to smoke a cigarette on the upper deck of an oil tanker, why would you want someone with a weapon up there?" said Graeme Gibbon-Brooks, who heads the private security company Dryad Maritime Intelligence.
Protecting the huge tankers that carry more than half of the world's oil supply is made even more difficult because of their slow speed. Sailors can typically distinguish fishermen from pirates around 300 yards, but by then it is too late to stop most attacks, Gibbon-Brooks said.
Twenty percent of global shipping — including 8% of global oil shipments — is funneled into the narrow, pirate-infested Gulf of Aden that leads through the Red Sea to the Suez Canal.
The Maran Centaurus had nine Greeks, 16 Filipinos, two Ukrainians and a Romanian aboard. The ship's owner reported to the EU Naval Force that the crew was not injured in the attack.
The vessel is the second oil tanker captured by Somali pirates. The Saudi-owned Sirius Star was released in January after a $3 million ransom was paid. It held 2 million barrels of oil valued at about $100 million.
The seizure of the Maran Centaurus will have a minimal effect on oil markets, said Ben Cahill, the petroleum risk manager at global oil consultancy PFC energy, although American refineries in the Gulf of Mexico region waiting for the ship's crude might experience some disruption.
Source: AP, Nov 30, 2009