DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Somali pirates have hijacked a Saudi-owned oil supertanker loaded with crude and carrying 25 crew members off the Kenyan coast, the US Navy said Monday. It was the largest ship pirates have seized, and the farthest out to sea they have successfully struck.
The hijacking was alarming because it highlighted the vulnerability of even very large ships and pointed to widening ambitions and capabilities among ransom-hungry pirates who have carried out a surge of attacks this year off Somalia.
Saturday's hijacking of the MV Sirius Star tanker occurred in the Indian Ocean far south of the zone patrolled by international warships in the busy Gulf of Aden shipping channel, which leads to and from the Suez Canal.
Maritime security experts said they have tracked a troubling spread in pirate activity southward into a vast area of ocean that would be extremely difficult and costly to patrol, and this hijacking fits that pattern.
"It is very alarming," said Cyrus Mody, manager of the International Maritime Bureau. "It had been slightly more easy to get it under control in the Gulf of Aden because it is a comparatively smaller area of water which has to be patrolled, but this is huge."
The tanker, which is owned by Saudi oil company Aramco, is one of the largest ships to sail the seas. It is 330 meters (1,080 feet) long, or about the length of an aircraft carrier, and can carry about 2 million barrels of oil.
Lt. Nathan Christensen, a spokesman for the US Navy's 5th Fleet, said the Sirius Star was carrying crude at the time of the hijacking, but he did know how much. He also had no details about where the ship was sailing from and where it was headed at the time of the attack.
He said the bandits were taking it to an anchorage off the Somali port of Eyl. The port on Somalia's northeastern coast has become a pirate haven and a number of ships are already being held there as pirates try to force ransoms.
The ship was sailing under a Liberian flag and its 25-member crew includes citizens of Croatia, Britain, the Philippines, Poland and Saudi Arabia. A British Foreign Office spokesman said there were at least two British nationals aboard the vessel.
The Sirius Star was attacked more than 450 nautical miles southeast of Mombasa, Kenya, the US 5th Fleet said in a statement from its Middle East headquarters in Bahrain.
"It's the largest ship we've seen hijacked and one attacked farthest out on the sea," Christensen said.
The capturing of the oil tanker represents a "fundamental shift in the ability of pirates to be able to attack merchant vessels," he said.
The Sirius Star was built in South Korea's Daewoo shipping yards and commissioned in March. Classed as a Very Large Crude Carrier, the ship is 318,000 dead weight tons.
If it were fully loaded, the ship's deck would be lower to the water, making it easier for pirates to climb aboard with grappling equipment and ladders, as they do in most hijackings.
It is not clear if there was a security team on board the vessel. An operator with Aramco said there was no one available at the company to comment after business hours. Calls went unanswered at Vela international, the Dubai-based marine company that operated the ship for Aramco.
Somali pirates are trained fighters, often dressed in military fatigues, using speedboats equipped with satellite phones and GPS equipment. They are In Somalia, pirates are better-funded, better-organized and better-armed than one might imagine in a country that has been in tatters for nearly two decades.
They do occasionally get nabbed, however. Earlier this year, French commandos used night vision goggles and helicopters in operations that killed or captured several pirates, who are now standing trial in Paris. The stepped-up international presence recently also appears to have deterred several attacks.
Raja Kiwan, a Dubai-based analyst with PFC Energy, said the hijacking raises "some serious questions" about what is needed to secure such ships when they are on the open seas.
"It's not easy to take over a ship" as massive as an oil tanker, particularly VLCC's that can transport about 2 million barrels of crude, he said. He said such vessels typically have an armed security contingent on board but could not say military presence in recent months.
But Saturday's hijacking occurred much farther south, highlighting weaknesses in the international response to the problem.
"The coalition has suppressed a number of attacks ... but there will never be enough warships," said Graeme Gibbon Brooks, the managing director of British company Dryad Maritime Intelligence Service Ltd. "The whole area is 2.5 million square miles (6.5 million square kilometers) ... the coalition have to act preemptively and be one step ahead of the pirates. The difficulty here is that the ship was beyond the area where the coalition were currently acting."
