According to a U.S. official, Captain Richard Phillips attempted to escape from his Somali pirate captors last night. After two days of sitting in a lifeboat with a bunch of assholes carrying AK-47s, Phillips jumped over the side of the lifeboat & tried to swim for the USS Bainbridge. However, the pirates jumped in after him & brought him back to the lifeboat.
The U.S. military has every reason to believe that he was unharmed in the incident, the official said.
Phillips has been held since Wednesday, when the hijackers briefly seized control of his ship, the Maersk Alabama. He is being held by four gunmen in the lifeboat about 300 miles off the Horn of Africa.
American reinforcements are headed to the area, but now comes reports the Pirates are attempting to call in reinforcements as well. Their reinforcements would consist of Pirates on captured vessels carrying hundreds of hostages.
From the Washington Post:
Somali sources said other pirates were headed toward the scene off the Horn of Africa country, where their colleagues were thwarted Wednesday by the American crew of the 17,000-ton Maersk Alabama container ship. The second pirate boat, which was a previously hijacked German ship, was loaded with guns, and held seven hostages, including French nationals who had been seized earlier, to deter the U.S. military from any action, the sources said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for their safety.
The pirates aimed to rescue their colleagues and probably also secure a cut of any ransom eventually paid, said the sources, who include a pirate's brother, a former pirate negotiator and a resident of the coastal pirate town of Harardhere, who said the boat left there late Thursday afternoon.
Four other previously hijacked ships were also reported to be on the way Friday loaded with dozens of hostages including citizens of China, Germany, Russia and Ukraine, the Associated Press reported.
However, a defense official is quoted in the article as saying the United States Navy will not allow a second group of pirates to get near the scene.
This problem has been festering for a while. Last December, the United Nations Security Council unanimously authorized the ability of member states to pursue & attack suspected pirates inside Somalia, on land or by air, if approved by Somalia's transitional federal government. On the same day the Security Council met to pass Resolution 1851, Somali pirates seized four ships. One of the ships, the Chinese vessel Zhenhua 4, was able to repulse the pirates, like the crew of the Maersk Alabama, after a long struggle where the crew used fire hoses & Molotov cocktails.
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Nine pirates armed with rocket launchers and machineguns boarded the ship, Xinhua, the Chinese state-run news agency, reported.
The vessel’s thirty crew members fought for four hours with home-made firebombs and beer bottles, an official with the China Maritime Search and Rescue Centre said. The pirates abandoned their attempt to take the ship when a multilateral force, including a warship and two helicopters, arrived after the crew had locked themselves in their cabins and radioed for help.
"Seven of the nine pirates landed on our ship, all with weapons," said the captain, Peng Weiyuan, speaking to China Central Television. "Our crew, who had been well trained and prepared, used water cannon, self-made incendiary bombs [Molotov cocktails or petrol bombs], beer bottles and anything else that could be used to battle with them. Thirty minutes later, the pirates gestured to us for a ceasefire. "Then the helicopter from the joint fleet came to help us."