Maersk Alabama, (above center) has been hijacked off Somalia with at
least 20 American crew members on board. Six vessels have been
hijacked in the last week by Somalian pirates, like the ones shown
in these file images.
Correspondents in Nairobi and New York | April 09
THE crew of a US-flagged, Danish-owned freighter hijacked by pirates off Somalia have retaken control of the ship but their captain is still being held hostage on a lifeboat.
For the first time a ship with a US crew was hijacked by Somali pirates.
"We are just trying to offer them whatever we can, food, but it is not working too good," Mr Quinn said.
"We have a coalition warship that will be here in three hours. We are just trying to hold them off for three more hours and then we will have a warship here to help us," he said.
The ship's operator, Maersk Line Ltd, confirmed that the US crew had regained control of the 17,000-tonne Maersk Alabama after the pirates left the ship with one hostage.
A spokesman for the company said no injuries had been reported for the rest of the crew left aboard.
Maritime officials said the Maersk Alabama was carrying food aid for Somalia and Uganda from Djibouti to Mombasa, a Kenyan port, when it was seized far out in the Indian Ocean.
The seizure was the latest in an escalation in pirate attacks off the lawless Horn of Africa country of Somalia.
"We can confirm that our crew has control of the ship. The pirates have departed the ship and they have taken one crew member with them as a hostage," the Maersk Line spokesman said, but could not confirm whether the hostage was the captain.
A Pentagon spokeswoman, Army Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Hibner, said the US Navy destroyer Bainbridge was en route.
Details on how far away it was were not immediately available.
The ship seizure, about 480km off Somalia, was the first time Somali pirates have seized US citizens, if only briefly.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she was very worried by the hijacking and called for world action to end the "scourge" of piracy.
"We are deeply concerned and we are following it very closely," Ms Clinton said in Washington.
"Specifically, we are now focused on this particular act of piracy and the seizure of the ship that carries 21 American citizens. More generally, we think the world must come together to end the scourge of piracy."
The Maersk Line spokesman said that the company was working with the US military and other government agencies to address the situation.
Mr Quinn said the four pirates sank their own boat when they boarded the container ship. However, the captain talked them into getting off the freighter and into the ship's lifeboat with him.
The crew then overpowered one of the pirates and sought to exchange him for the captain, Mr Quinn told CNN.
"We kept him for 12 hours. We tied him up," he said. The crew released their captive to the other pirates, but the exchange did not work and the captain was still being held by the pirates on the lifeboat.
"They are not aboard. We are controlling" the ship, he said.
Maersk Line is a Norfolk, Virginia-based subsidiary of Denmark's A.P. Moller-Maersk, the world's biggest container shipper.
Among the ship's cargo were 400 containers of food aid, including 232 containers belonging to the UN's World Food Program that were destined for Somalia and Uganda.
The seizure was the latest in a wave of pirate attacks. Gunmen from Somalia seized a British-owned ship on Monday after hijacking another three vessels over the weekend.
In the first three months of 2009 just eight ships were hijacked in the strategic Gulf of Aden, which links Asia, the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea to Europe via the Suez Canal.
Last year, heavily armed Somali pirates hijacked dozens of vessels, took hundreds of sailors hostage often for weeks and extracted millions of dollars in ransoms.
Foreign navies sent warships to the area in response and reduced the number of successful attacks.
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