The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [96]
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Levenescu was lying in his cabin when the attack came. He immediately knew something was wrong when he heard the knocking of the propeller, indicating that the vessel was attempting to turn at top speed. When he heard the pirates on the deck above, Levenescu and seven of his crewmates, all save Captain Petru Constantin Tinu and two seamen, went back into their cabins and locked themselves in.
The attack did not come as a complete surprise, Levenescu told me, since there had been an attempted hijacking in the area only seven hours earlier. Levenescu knew this because it had been his duty to monitor international piracy bulletins and report potential trouble spots to the captain. Before entering “Pirate Alley,” moreover, the crew had implemented a series of counter-piracy measures ordered by the vessel’s German owners: positioning high-powered water hoses, welding metal plates to the windows on the first and second levels, and blocking the stairwells leading up to the bridge. None of these precautions, however, made much difference to a ship as slow and sluggish as the Victoria.
The deck officer and second mate, Ruxandra Sarchizian, spotted the pirates at only six kilometres’ distance (the Victoria’s radar was blind to the attack craft until it was three kilometres away). “There were nine of them in one ten-metre-long boat,” Levenescu recalled. “They came up fast on our port side, moving at twenty knots.” Equipped with two 350-horsepower outboard motors, the craft was carrying about five hundred litres of gasoline—not nearly enough fuel, it must be noted, to get them back to Somalia (Hussein Hersi may not have been exaggerating when he spoke of his cousins’ suicidal “capture or die” philosophy).
Even though the Victoria had been travelling in the Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor and was in the vicinity of two NATO frigates, Mohamed Abdi and his team boarded the vessel unmolested. When asked how the pirates could have pulled off their assault practically under the gunnels of two warships, Levenescu rolled his eyes. “They’re useless,” he scoffed. “There was a warship, a Turkish one, fifty miles away when we were attacked. But at the same time, a Turkish cargo ship was also calling for help, and so it chose to help them instead.”1
Sarchizian raised the warship on radio, but instead of mobilizing a response, the Turks plied her with aimless questions. “What colour is the boat, what speed is it going at, how many pirates, how many guns, what kind of guns, … all this shit, you know? Help us! Finally, when the pirates were about fifteen cables away, they said a chopper would arrive in thirty-five minutes,” said Levenescu. When it arrived, the helicopter circled two or three times overhead as the pirates nervously tracked it with their rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launchers. “The warships, they don’t prevent anything,” Levenescu said, with a contempt he extended to the international safety corridor. “That corridor is hell,” he said. “It just makes the pirates’ job easier, because they know where all the ships will be going. ‘Okay,’ they say, ‘Let’s fish!’ ”2
The sea was calm, and with the Victoria’s thirteen-knot top speed and two-metre freeboard, the pirates had been able to board her with ease; the entire hijacking, from sighting to capture, took less than forty minutes. Once on deck, the pirates fired several rounds from their Kalashnikovs into the air in an attempt to intimidate the crew into surrendering. As the rest of the crew huddled on the lower decks, the captain and two seamen barricaded themselves in the bridge. Using a four-metre aluminum ladder, the attackers climbed from level to level until they reached the command deck. One pirate advanced with his weapon raised, shooting