US ship captain 'still held hostage by pirates'

The American crew of a hijacked US-flagged ship retook control of the vessel from Somali pirates today, but the captain was still being held hostage in a lifeboat, according three people on board.

US officials said an American warship and a half dozen others were headed to the scene. One official said the destroyer USS Bainbridge was headed there. Another official said there were six or seven ships on the way.

"Right now they want to hold our captain for ransom, and we are trying to get him back," second mate Ken Quinn told CNN in a live interview after the cable news network called the boat.

"We had one of their hostages, we had a pirate. We took him for 12 hours. We tied him up. We returned him. But they didn't return the captain," Mr Quinn said.

The captain was on a lifeboat with the pirates, he said.

"Right now we are trying to offer them whatever we can, food. It's not working too good."

He said the crew was communicating with the captain by radio.

The company that operates the ship confirmed that it was back in the crew's hands and said the hijackers had departed with a crew member.

Professor Joseph Murphy, of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, said he was called by the Department of Defense and told the crew, including his son Shane, the second in command, had control of the ship.

Colin Wright, who identified himself as a third mate aboard the ship, said: "Somalian pirates have one of our crew members in our lifeboat and we are trying to recover that crew member."

Asked whether that crew member was the ship's captain, Colin said he could not say anything else. A person aboard the ship told reporters by phone earlier that it was the captain who was being held by the pirates.

At one point, the pirates had held the boat and the entire crew of Americans. Mr Wright said: "We're really busy right now, but you can call back in an hour or two."

President Barack Obama was following the situation closely, foreign policy adviser Denis McDonough said.

The ship was carrying emergency food relief to Mombasa, Kenya, when it was hijacked, the Copenhagen-based container shipping group AP Moller-Maersk said.

"We are able to confirm that the crew of the Maersk Alabama has is now in control of the ship," said Kevin Speers, a spokesman for Maersk Lines Limited.

"The armed hijackers who boarded this ship earlier today have departed, however they are currently holding one member of the ship's crew as a hostage. The other members of the crew are safe and no injuries have been reported."

It was the sixth vessel seized within a week, a rise that analysts attribute to a new strategy by Somali pirates who are operating far from the warships patrolling the Gulf of Aden.

Cmdr. Jane Campbell, a spokeswoman for the US Navy's Bahrain-based 5th Fleet, said that it was the first pirate attack "involving US nationals and a US-flagged vessel in recent memory".

Somali pirates are trained fighters who frequently dress in military fatigues and use speedboats equipped with satellite phones and GPS equipment.

They are typically armed with automatic weapons, anti-tank rocket launchers and various types of grenades. Far out to sea, their speedboats operate from larger mother ships.

The US Navy said that the ship was hijacked about 280 miles south-east of Eyl, a town in the northern Puntland region of Somalia.

Since January, pirates have staged 66 attacks, and they are still holding 14 ships and 260 crew members as hostages, according to the International Maritime Bureau, a watchdog group based in Kuala Lumpur.