U.S. Cargo Ship Attacked and Robbed
In a relatively lightly published and un-noticed event, the U.S. flagged cargo ship M/V SAGAMORE was attacked and robbed on Aug. 8th by two men with AK-47s near the al-Basrah Oil Terminal, which lies about 19 miles from the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr. The SAGAMORE is operated by Sealift Inc., a privately held company based out of Oyster Bay, NY. The SAGAMORE is a 3838 GRT General Cargo Ship.
BAGHDAD — Gunmen robbed four commercial ships anchored near the southern oil hub of Basra in a rare attack off the Iraqi coast, the U.S. Navy said Sunday.
Two men armed with AK-47 rifles boarded the American ship Sagamore in the vicinity of an Iraqi oil terminal in the northern Persian Gulf at 4 a.m. on Aug. 8, taking computers, cell phones and money from crew members before fleeing the vessel after about 40 minutes on board, according to Lt. John Fage, a spokesman for the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.
He said three other ships — the Antigua-flagged Armenia, the North Korean Crystal Wave and the Syrian Sana Star — were also robbed under similar circumstances during a two-hour period starting about 2 a.m. the same day.
Fage said he had no other information about the attackers or their nationalities.
Salah Aboud, head of the country’s ports agency, said two Iraqis were arrested after Iraqi naval forces found a boat holding some of the stolen materials during a search of a nearby area.
The seaborne robbery occurred about 20 miles (32 kilometers) off the port of Umm Qasr in an area patrolled jointly by the U.S. Navy and Iraqi sailors. American vessels in the area for routine security operations, including a guided missile destroyer, responded to the attacks, Fage said.
The attack reflects concerns about an increase in crime in Iraq even as political violence ebbs, but Fage played down concerns it signaled a new threat to commercial traffic in the Gulf.
On July 28, a Japanese oil tanker elsewhere in the Gulf was damaged and one crew member was injured in what the United Arab Emirates said was a suicide bombing.
M/V Sagamore (Photo/Sealift Inc.)
Other reports on the web indicate that nobody was seriously injured, and most of the stolen items were returned following the apprehension of the suspects. Reportedly, the attacks did not qualify as piracy under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea because they took place in Iraqi regional waters and not on the high seas.
The Maritime Bulletin reported the following additional details -
After receiving a distress call from the Sagamore at 4:35 a.m., the U.S. Navys Fifth Fleet deployed a guided missile destroyer and a U.S. Coast Guard cutter to ensure the ships security. “Even if you have ships in the area, they cant be next to every single ship in the area,” said Fage. “Its a large body of water, and they cant be everywhere all at once.” The U.S. Navy then notified the Iraqi Coast Guard, which sent four boats in search of the pirates, according to Col. Mehdi Ahmed, the deputy commander of those forces. Those boats apparently pursued the pirates to a shoreline area dense with reeds. At that point, official accounts differ. According to Ahmed, the Coast Guard stopped the suspect boat, but the pirates themselves escaped into the marsh. According to the media director of Iraqi ports, Anmar al-Safi, “the Coast Guard managed to apprehend those looters and confiscated stolen stuff.” Iraqi officials all downplayed the incident as an isolated act of petty criminals. “Describing those thieves as „pirates is not a common thing for us,” said Capt. Maan al-Basri of the Iraqi Coast Guard. “Theyre only a bunch of looters in the waters of the Gulf and Shat al-Arab.” Al-Safi, media director of the Iraqi ports, agreed: “What happened was just an ordinary robbery. Were not in Somalia!”
