Translated material
"Beluga" escaped from captivity
Military and sailors managed to free a ship captured by pirates
A lucky chance and professionalism yesterday saved the German bulk carrier Beluga Fortune with Russians on board from many months of pirate captivity, and the owners of the ship from paying a multimillion-dollar ransom. “Beluga Fortune has been freed, the pirates have abandoned her, and none of her crew were injured,” Andrew Mwangura, the coordinator of the program for assisting seafarers in East Africa, was the first to bring the good news. There was very little information on the progress of the liberation as of yesterday evening, but it is known that the container ship that the bandits tried to seize continued its journey to Richards Bay in South Africa with only minor damage on board.“The cool behavior of the Beluga crew on board and the quick actions of the naval forces left the pirates no choice but to abandon their dream of a million dollar ransom and flee,” the press service of the ship-owner Beluga Shipping GmBH said in a statement. .
Sea robbers attacked the Beluga Fortune on Sunday off the coast of Kenya, 1,930 km east of the city of Mombasa. On board the hijacked vessel were three Russian citizens, three Ukrainian citizens and eight Filipino citizens. In addition, there is information that the crew included two German citizens. The Russian seafarers' union said pirates attacked the ship in the central Indian Ocean on its way from the United Arab Emirates to the port of Richards Bay in South Africa. Apparently, the seizure of the cargo ship followed a pattern already worked out by the bandits: pirates on boats surrounded the ship and boarded it, but the crew still managed to transmit an SOS signal and barricade themselves in a hard-to-reach room on the ship.
As it became known after the release, the sailors on the team regularly underwent safety training on the ship and knew what to do. "The Beluga Fortune team acted very prudently and followed the required safety steps to the letter. They reported that the ship was hijacked, hid in a specially equipped room, turned off the main engine, stopped the fuel supply and radioed the naval patrols nearby. Thus, the pirates were not able to make the sailors their hostages,” said the head of the ship-owning company, Nils Stolberg.
It is worth noting that the day before, on Saturday, the robbers also managed to seize the York liquefied gas tanker flying the Singapore flag off the Kenyan coast. There are 17 crew members on board, including two Ukrainians. However, nothing is yet known about the fate of this vessel.
The last incident involving Russian citizens occurred in the Gulf of Aden in May of this year and also ended in a happy liberation. Pirates hijacked the Liberian-flagged tanker Moscow University, which was carrying 86 thousand tons of oil from the Red Sea to China, but the ship was freed the very next day by the crew and the Russian anti-submarine ship Marshal Shaposhnikov, which came to the rescue. At the same time, the Russian military managed to kill one pirate and capture the rest. They were later released, but, as a representative of the Russian Ministry of Defense said, “the pirates did not reach the shore.”