DUBAI – Pirates on Wednesday seized a supertanker off the coast of Oman bound for the United States carrying a crew of 25 and a load of more than 1.9 million barrels of oil, officials said. “We cannot contact the vessel,” an official with Enesel, the Greek company that manages the Irene SL, told AFP by telephone.
The tanker was carrying “about 270,000 metric tons” of Kuwaiti crude, which translates to over 1.9 million barrels of oil, he said, asking not to be named. The Bahrain-based Combined Maritime Forces said the Greek-flagged ship was hijacked at 0926 GMT about 220 nautical miles east of the Omani coast, in the Arabian Sea. “We can confirm that the Irene SL has been pirated off the coast of Oman,” a spokeswoman for the international naval force told AFP by telephone.
“It is an oil tanker,” she said, adding that it had a crew of 25 and was “bound for the US.” “We have no reports of casualties,” the spokeswoman said. While the identity of the hijackers is unknown, Somali pirates are the likely culprits. “We’ve got no specific information about who has taken it, but I think it would be reasonable to suspect it was an act of Somali piracy,” the spokeswoman said.
Various websites devoted to information on shipping listed the tanker as being 333 metres (1,092 feet) long with a 60-metre (196-foot) beam. Irene SL is the second oil tanker hijacked in two days. The European Union’s Atalanta mission to the seas off Somalia and the Gulf of Aden (Eunavfor) said an Italian oil tanker was taken early on Tuesday 600 miles east of the island of Socotra by a single skiff with five pirates who opened fire on the oiler.
That ship had a crew of 22 — five Italians and 17 Indians, EU forces said. Piracy has made shipping increasingly perilous off the Horn of Africa and led to the deployment of an international force to protect the key maritime corridor.
