Somali Pirates Hijack Saudi Arabian-Owned Oil Tanker

By Caroline Alexander

Nov. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Somali pirates hijacked a large oil tanker owned by Saudi Arabian Oil Co. off the coast of Kenya, in one of the most daring attacks on a merchant vessel in the region, the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet said.

The tanker, Sirius Star, operated by Vela International, was more than 450 nautical miles (833 kilometers) southeast of Mombasa when a group of pirates managed to scale the 10-meter (32-foot) high side of the ship, Lieutenant Nate Christensen said in a phone interview from Bahrain, where the Fifth Fleet is based.

Sirius Star, designed to carry more than 2 million barrels of crude, ``is three times the size of a U.S. aircraft carrier and shows how they are successfully expanding their operations,'' Christensen said, adding that previous attacks have occurred within 200 nautical miles of land.

The crew of 25 includes citizens of Croatia, the U.K., the Philippines, Poland, and Saudi Arabia, Christensen said. He said he believed the ship was carrying crude oil. Further information wasn't immediately available and telephones at the International Maritime Bureau and Saudi Aramco weren't being answered.

Piracy in the Gulf of Aden, between Yemen and Somalia, has more than doubled in 2008, with assailants using the global positioning system and satellite phones to find potential targets, according to an October report by the London-based research organization Chatham House.

Combating Piracy

The European Union agreed on Oct. 10 to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, India, Malaysia and Russia in deploying vessels to combat piracy. About 11 percent of the world's seaborne petroleum, on its way to the Suez Canal or regional refineries, passes through the Gulf of Aden.

The seizure is the first of a very large crude carrier, or VLCC, on record, Mark Jenkins, an analyst at Simpson, Spence & Young Ltd., the world's second-largest shipbroker, said by phone, adding the attack was ``probably opportunistic.''

Failure to increase the protection of its fleet would likely ``compromise'' Saudi Aramco's ability to sell oil to customers in the U.S. and Europe, Jenkins said.

``Even if you've got to spend quite a lot of money, it's going to be a worthwhile investment if the alternative is you can't sell the oil as readily as you would otherwise aim to do,'' he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Caroline Alexander in London at calexander1@bloomberg.net.