Pirates leave grenade on cruise ship

updated 11:36 p.m. ET Nov. 6, 2005

NAIROBI, Kenya - An unexploded rocket-propelled grenade remained on a U.S.-owned cruise ship after the vessel escaped an attack by pirates in the Indian Ocean over the weekend, Australia’s foreign minister said on Monday.

The Seabourn Spirit, with 151 passengers on board, was headed for the Seychelles where U.S. officials will disarm the grenade, Alexander Downer told Australian television.

“An unexploded rocket ... is embedded in some of the passenger accommodation of the ship,” said Downer. “American officials are going to board it initially to deal with that problem.”

Pirates in two small boats fired rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns at the cruise ship about 100 miles off the coast of Somalia on Saturday, but the vessel escaped and no one was hurt.

The ship, packed with western vacationers, was on a 16-day cruise from Egypt to Mombassa, Kenya.

Pirates becoming bolder
The attack shows pirates from the anarchic country on the Horn of Africa are becoming bolder and more ambitious in their efforts to hijack ships for ransom and loot, a maritime official warned Sunday.

Judging by the location of Saturday’s attack, the pirates were likely from the same group that hijacked a U.N.-chartered aid ship in June and held its crew and food cargo hostage for 100 days, said Andrew Mwangura, head of the Kenyan chapter of the Seafarers Assistance Program.

That gang is one of three well-organized pirate groups on the 1,880-mile coast of Somalia, which has had no effective government since opposition leaders ousted a dictatorship in 1991 and then turned on each other, leaving the nation of 7 million a patchwork of warlord fiefdoms.

Illustrating the chaos, attackers in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, threw grenades and exploded a land mine Sunday near a convoy carrying the prime minister of a transitional government that has been trying to exert control since late last year.

The attack, which killed at least five bodyguards, was the second in six months involving explosions near Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, whose internally divided government spends much of its time in Kenya.

Calls for coastal patrols
Even before the attack on the liner Seabourn Spirit, Gedi had urged neighboring countries to send warships to patrol Somalia’s stretch of coast, which is Africa’s longest and lies along key shipping lanes linking the Mediterranean with the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.

U.S. and NATO warships patrol the region to protect vessels in deeper waters farther out, but they are not permitted in Somali territorial waters. Despite those patrols, the heavily armed pirates approached the cruise ship about 100 miles at sea, underlining their increasing audacity.

The International Maritime Bureau has for several months warned ships to stay at least 150 miles away from Somalia’s coast, citing 25 pirate attacks in those waters since March 15 — compared with just two for all of 2004.

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