With a crew of 23 and 17,000 metric tons (19,000 short tons) of cargo, the ship, originating from Salalah, Oman, was bound for Mombasa, Kenya, after a stop in Djibouti.
“During a five-week period in the spring of 2009, Muse, a Somali citizen, led a gang of pirates on a series of violent attacks against three different ships that were navigating in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Somalia,” the government said in their argument for the maximum sentence of 405 months, which he ultimately received.
The captors were also communicating with other pirate vessels by satellite phone.
In his first letter, he told me to call him “Musa,” since that’s what everyone else did.
While he was interested to hear about Muse’s life now, Phillips doesn’t feel a particular need to know much more. [29], Muse, the surviving pirate, was held on USS Boxer and was eventually flown to the United States to stand trial. He’s living with the consequences now.”. Many news reports cited the last pirate seizure as being during the Second Barbary War in 1815, although other incidents had occurred as late as 1822.
An 18-man security team was on board.
“He didn’t have a chance to sue anybody in Somalia,” he laughed. The siege ended after a rescue effort by the United States Navy on 12 April.[1]. Radio communication between the two ships was established. “He snapped his three guys up and they followed him explicitly,” Phillips recalled.
[16], However, negotiations broke down hours after the pirates fired on Halyburton not long after sunrise on Saturday, 11 April. One expert believes the weather had a bigger impact than the patrols on the pirates.
In addition, Perry and First Assistant Engineer Matt Fisher swung the ship's rudder, which swamped the pirate skiff.[6].
We will defend ourselves if attacked", one of the pirates told Reuters by satellite phone. As he signed off his last letter to me, “P.S. He said his plan had been to work as a fisherman in what he described as a “small village on the ocean,” a place identified in a sentencing memorandum as Garacad, “one of a number of piracy centers” in the semi-autonomous province of Puntland.
There were also unconfirmed reports that the hijackers had called in reinforcements.”. The pirate was then tied up and his wounds were treated by Second Mate Ken Quinn. He said the fishermen who get into piracy are generally coastal fishermen who work the shorelines, and are “terrified” of going to sea.
From boasting about the millions he had made from prior hijackings to laughing after pulling the trigger of his pistol next to a hostage’s head to suggesting that he would cut up a hostage and sell his organs, Muse derived joy from the suffering of his victims.
[17] "We are safe and we are not afraid of the Americans. Murphy, who vividly remembers having his hands around Muse’s neck at one point during the hijacking, is now the captain of his own ship, the MV Energy Enterprise. I wrote to him a few more times, asking what he thought about the story, which parts he considered most accurate, and so forth.
The lifeboat from Maersk Alabama is at the Museum. The ship has since been acquired by Element Shipmanagement SA and has been renamed MV Tygra. Unfortunately, the conditions on the ground that created this problem in the first place “haven’t changed one little bit,” said Steed, the former UN counter-piracy head.