COLOMBO, Jan 29 (Reuters) – Six crew members of a Sri Lankan fishing trawler hijacked by suspected Somali pirates have been rescued, Sri Lankan officers mentioned on Monday.
The hijacking on Sunday was the most recent in a collection of assaults which have fuelled fears of a resurgence of Somali piracy within the Gulf of Aden and Crimson Sea waters after years with no profitable raid.
Pirates who brought about chaos in the important thing waterways from 2008 to 2018 seem like making the most of dysfunction brought on by assaults on transport by Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi group.
Authorities had been knowledgeable of the incident by a second boat travelling with the trawler on Sunday and the coast guard from the Seychelles responded, mentioned Sri Lankan navy spokesperson, Gayan Wickramasuriya.
“After a particular operation, the trawler and all its crew had been rescued and three suspected Somali pirates had been additionally detained,” he mentioned.
The rescue occurred about 230 nautical miles from Seychelles’ Mahe Island, Wickramasuriya mentioned.
The Maltese-flagged MV Ruen has been held for a month-and-a-half close to the Somali coast within the first hijacking of a service provider ship by Somali pirates since 2017.
On Saturday, a safety workforce on a bulk service 780 nautical miles of Somalia’s coast exchanged hearth with armed people on a skiff after it got here suspiciously near the vessel, British maritime screens mentioned.
(Reporting by Uditha Jayasinghe; writing by George Obulutsa in Nairobi; Modifying by Aaron Ross and Ros Russell)
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