Russian marines on Thursday freed a Russian oil tanker hijacked by Somali pirates a day earlier in the Arabian Sea in a 22-minute gunfight that saw one pirate killed and 10 others arrested.
The 23 Russian sailors on the Moscow University tanker — who cut power to the vessel and spent the 20-hour ordeal holed up in the engine room — emerged unharmed, a Navy spokeswoman told The Moscow Times.
President Dmitry Medvedev praised the marines for their quick and professional work and ordered that they be decorated with state medals.
He promised that the captured pirates would be punished “under the full force of naval law,” Interfax reported.
Russian officials have not decided whether to bring the detained pirates to Moscow or hand them over for trial to an African court.
The state-owned tanker was attacked about 350 nautical miles from Socotra, Yemen, in what was the first hijacking of a Russian-owned ship with a Russian crew in the pirate-infested waters off the coast of lawless Somalia.
Communication with the ship ceased at 8 a.m. Wednesday Moscow time, when the captain radioed that two boats carrying gunmen had approached the ship and opened fire.
The pirates had warned against any rescue attempt, saying they were holding the crew members hostage and taking the tanker to the Somali coast.
But the crew members managed to evade the attackers by hiding in the engine room, separated from the rest of the ship by a solid metal door, a European Union naval official told Interfax. The pirates did not dare to blow up the door because it could cause the 86,000 tons of crude oil being transported by the tanker from Sudan to China to burn or explode.
Moreover, the captain turned off the power on the whole ship from the engine room, effectively marooning the vessel, the unidentified naval official said.
The sailors had stocked the engine room with food and water and were ready to withstand a siege, Itar-Tass reported.
The Russian Navy immediately dispatched the Marshal Shaposhnikov warship to the site of the hijacking, and it was to reach the tanker by 11 p.m. Wednesday Moscow time.
The warship is among several U.S. and European military vessels protecting ships from pirates in the region.
The pirates on the tanker tried to shoot down a helicopter sent by the Marshal Shaposhnikov to rescue the ship, the EU’s anti-piracy naval task force, Navfor, said in a statement.
The marines began negotiations but then launched a surprise attack, using three motor boats with six to eight troops each.
The Navy said the ensuing gunfight lasted 22 minutes, RIA-Novosti reported.
The entire rescue operation took 3 1⁄2 hours, the Investigative Committee said. It said one pirate was killed in the shootout and several of the 10 who surrendered were injured.
Veteran rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva praised the operation, saying Russia defended its citizens like a normal country should.
Medvedev reiterated a call that he first made in May last year to create an international court to try pirates, and he ordered the Defense Ministry and the Foreign Ministry to start drafting the legal framework for such a court.
“Maybe we should go back to the idea of creating an international court and other legal instruments,” Medvedev said at a meeting with Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov. “Until this happens, we will have to act like our ancestors did when they met pirates.”
A 1982 UN convention signed by Moscow gives the country that captures pirates the right to prosecute them, the head of the Moscow-based Association of International Naval Law, Anatoly Kolodkin, told Interfax.
But in April 2009, the Russian warship Admiral Panteleyev handed more than two dozen pirates from Somalia, Iran and Pakistan that it captured off the Somali coast over to Iranian and Pakistani authorities for prosecution.
The Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case against the attackers on charges of piracy, which carry a maximum sentence of up to 15 years in prison.
Investigators were interviewing the tanker’s crew members Thursday, Interfax reported.
The Moscow University, which operates under a Liberian flag, will most likely continue its voyage to China after investigators complete their inquiry, the Foreign Ministry said.
The cargo is valued at $52 million and belongs to the oil trader Unipec, an affiliate of China’s Sinopec, Reuters reported.
The tanker is operated by Novoship, a state-controlled, Novorossiisk-based company that is part of Sovcomflot, and has a dead weight of 106,000 tons.
Novorossiisk authorities are considering offering financial compensation to the freed sailors, 14 of whom are from Novorossiisk, a source in the city administration told Interfax.
The Russian Navy dispatched its first warship to the waters off the coast of Somalia in September 2008 after pirates seized a Ukrainian ship with a 20-member crew that included three Russians. The ship, which carried a cargo of 33 battle tanks, was freed last February after Ukrainian billionaire Viktor Pinchuk paid a ransom estimated at $4 million.
In November, pirates on two skiffs captured a Thai-flagged fishing trawler, the Thai Union 3, with a crew with 23 Kaliningrad sailors, two Filipinos and two Ghanaians some 650 miles off the Somali coast. The pirates freed the sailors and their ship four months later in exchange for an estimated ransom of $3 million, paid by the Russian authorities.