Malaysia’s navy has located a tanker that disappeared a week ago in the South China Sea and was urging its hijackers to surrender, the country’s naval chief said yesterday.
The MT Orkim Harmony, which had 6,000 tonnes of oil in its hold and 22 crew aboard, has been given fresh touches of paint and had its name altered to Kim Harmon, according to photos released by Malaysia’s navy.
A patrol vessel was now shadowing the tanker and communicating with its hijackers in a bid to secure their surrender, Royal Malaysian Navy chief Admiral Abdul Aziz Jaafar said on his Twitter feed.
“At least eight perpetrators are onboard. They are armed with pistols and parangs [machetes]. They speak with Indonesian accent[s],” he said.
“All crew are safe and unharmed,” he added.
The vessel was in Vietnamese waters, about 200 nautical miles (370km) northeast of the Malaysian city of Kota Bahru, officials said.
The Malaysian-registered tanker is the latest victim of increasingly brazen pirates behind an upsurge in hijackings in Southeast Asia in the past two years.
The typical targets are usually tankers carrying valuable oil.
Officials have estimated the value of the MT Orkim Harmony’s cargo at 21 million ringgit (US$5.6 million). Its crew includes 16 Malaysians, five Indonesians and a Burmese.
It was en route from Malacca on Malaysia’s west coast to the port of Kuantan on the eastern coast. Its owners lost contact with the ship on Thursday last week, while it was off the southern state of Johor.
The vessel was spotted on Wednesday by a search-and-rescue operation, officials said.
The London-based International Maritime Bureau (IMB) has repeatedly warned that the waters of Southeast Asia were becoming the world’s piracy hotspot and called for decisive regional action to thwart attacks.
Pirates are preying on slow-moving small coastal tankers, with one attack occurring every two weeks, the IMB said recently.
The MT Orkim Harmony’s owners, Malaysia’s Orkim Ship Management, has said the tanker’s cargo appeared untouched after analyzing photos of the hijacked vessel, said Ahmad Puzi, a top Malaysian coast guard official.
Asked whether authorities might storm the vessel, he told reporters in Malaysia’s administrative capital of Putrajaya, “our options are open.”
However, he later suggested that the navy preferred to take the hijackers alive.
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