Nov 19, 2008 11:16 pm US/Eastern
Pirates Cut Annapolis Woman's Vacation Short
ANNAPOLIS, Md. (WJZ) ―
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Pirates boarded and captured a huge tanker out on the high seas. It's happening more often and it even happened to one Maryland woman.
CBS
Pirates boarded and captured a huge tanker out on the high seas. It's happening more often and it even happened to one Maryland woman.
Dennis Edwards spoke with a woman from Annapolis about the day pirates cut her vacation short.
The pictures are like deja vu for Meg Rhian, who survived a pirate attempt to take over her cruise ship a few years ago.
This week an Indian warship opened fire, sinking a pirate mother ship in the Gulf of Aden. It happened on the same day a Thai boat was hijacked along with an Iranian cargo carrier off the coast of Somalia. A few days earlier, a $100 million Saudi supertanker was seized in the same waters.
Just this week alone, eight ships in waters between the Arabian peninsula and the horn of Africa have been taken over by men in small boats.
In the fall of 2005, Rhian and her now deceased husband were on board a cruise ship bound for the Seychelles Islands when men in boats tried to stop and take the ship. The captain crushed one boat in the process of escaping.
"So these ships were approaching us. They were fiberglass--the pirate boats--and they don't show up on radar," she said.
She tells
Eyewitness News she has a good idea on how to stop the attacks and wonders why someone's not doing it. The Indian warship, she says, did the right thing when it fired on the pirate mother ship.
"Because that's where these pirates come from. They can't go 300 miles off shore in these little fiberglass fishing boats. There's a mother ship much closer than that," she said.
Now the Pentagon is on the defensive. It denies allegations that not enough is being done, but a spokesperson isn't talking about specific steps taken by U.S. naval forces.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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