Deodatus Mfugale, AfricaNews reporter in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
The Saudi crude oil supertanker, Sirius Star, which was hijacked by Somali pirates early this week, is reportedly anchored off Eyl, a remote coastal village used by the pirates as a hideout for hijacked ships. It is the second biggest pirates' "catch" after a Ukrainian ship early this year with tanks.
Coordinator of the East African Seafarers Association in Kenya, Andrew Mwangura, said on Tuesday that some residents had spotted an unusually big vessel near the small port of Eyl, indicating that it could be the Sirius Star. “But they would probably dock it about eight miles off Eyl,” Mwangura had told Reuters.
The tanker with a cargo of crude oil worth about USD 100 million was on its way to the USA through the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa and it was hijacked 450 nautical miles Southeast of Mombasa port, far away from the Yemeni coast where most of the ships have been hijacked. The Sirius is by far the biggest catch in terms of size and value of the loot; it is three times the size of an aircraft carrier and has a cargo of two million barrels of oil worth about USD 100 million. It had also 25 crews from Croatia, UK, the Philippines, Poland and Saudi Arabia.
Observers the world over have been baffled by the way the pirates conducted such a successful operation in the international waters. The Gulf of Aden and the busiest parts of the Indian Ocean are heavily guarded by international naval response including those from NATO, the European Union, Russia and Canada but the pirates were shrewd enough to outwit these units and hijack the tanker.
“The world has never seen anything like this,” Mwangura said on Tuesday. On his part, Chairman of US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said on Monday that he was stunned by how the pirates could successfully execute the hijacking given the size of the ship and the distance from the land.
"I understand it was hijacked about 450 miles south east of Kenya. That's the longest distance I've seen for any of these incidents," he had said. Many people see the hijacking of the Sirius Star as a puzzle that is not easy to solve particularly because the seas are usually guarded but the pirates have been allowed to operate in the high seas without being challenged.
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