Check out that picture, does that look like a merchant vessel to you? No, of course not, she's La Somme, a 3,800 ton logistics and command vessel for the French anti-piracy effort. She's the flagship of the fleet, 160 meters long, assumedly crewed by skilled sailors and reasonably armed.
The pirates didn't realize that when they opened fire with AK-47s. They had two small boats and about ten pirates. La Somme captured one of the two boats and arrested five pirates. And by the way, the attack took place some 250 nautical miles off of the coast of Somalia. That is a long way to be from shore in a tiny little boat even if you do have an automatic rifle.
Somali pirates got a lot of press a while back and the Gulf of Aden was a frequent source of news. The volume has died down quite a bit recently, perhaps due to international anti piracy efforts or more likely reduced shock value and loss of general interest.
This one was different enough for Elaine Ganley (for AP) to pick up.
The link goes to Yahoo! again, but they have a neat slide show and a pic of the pirate boat.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091007/ap_on_re_af/piracy
EDIT
I beat Iltalehti, our yellow news tabloid by about 7 hours getting this post online. Their post is remarkably similar, but we both use the same source and there's not too much information available, so perhaps that is coincidence. Link below.
http://www.iltalehti.fi/ulkomaat/2009100810387878_ul.shtml
No comments:
Post a Comment