Landing the Big One

Landing the Big One

Monday, November 07, 2005

Somali pirate Mother Ship?

Interesting add on to the pirate attack against the cruise ship:
After the attack had been repulsed, a cargo ship some eight miles behind the liner radioed that it, too was being attacked by the pirates, and called for help. But the captain checked a real-time satellite log of ships at sea, and thought better of going back to assist.

"(The log) showed the destination of the boat as "to the next galaxy", so it's pretty certain that that was the mother ship for the small ship that came and got us, and they were trying to lure us back," Rogers says.

One of the rocket-launched grenades the pirates fired at the cruise ship landed in the cabin across from Rogers' stateroom. It didn't explode, but lodged in the ceiling. When they reached the Seychelles, a US military bomb disposal unit took the grenade off the ship before it tied up.
Earlier post on the attack here

UPDATE: Australia's foreign minister says it may have been a terrorist attack:
Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said it was possible the attackers were terrorists rather than pirates.
Pointing out the size of the 10,000-ton liner and the fact the heavily-armed attackers had fired rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns at it, he suggested that they may have intended to damage the vessel and hurt people onboard rather than seize the ship -- the usual goal of modern-day pirates.

"Attacking it -- even if you've got a rocket-propelled grenade -- and taking the ship over, that seems to me to be a little improbable," he said in one of several broadcast interviews.

"But damaging the ship and killing people, which might have been their motive, that's something they could have easily done if the rocket-propelled grenades had worked properly."

Noting that the ship was based in Miami and had many Americans onboard, Downer said the assailants may have seen it as a U.S. target.

"Somalia is a country which harbors a number of terrorists, we believe, so it's conceivable these people were terrorists," he said, but added that "we really can't draw any hard and fast conclusions at this stage."
So does this guy.

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