<i>A luxury cruise line will re-evaluate whether to offer future cruises off the coast of Somalia after pirates attempted to attack one of its ships early Saturday.
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<b>http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/africa/11/05/somalia.pirates/</b>

I was just watching CNN and I heard this story, but this article gives a lot more detail. How frightening, but it could have been a lot worse. Thank God the captain and crew did such a great job of fending off those pirates. I hope Seabourn will avoid that area on future cruises.

This is very frightening. Bravo to the crew for turning the situation into a heroic tale instead of a tragedy.

A couple of years ago when our cruise ship pulled into Key West, I noticed a sniper on the pier.

A trained sniper on a cruise ship could have certainly thwarted such an attempt of piracy from the pictures of the boats the pirates were in.

Now that I have heard about this, it makes me wonder why things like this don't happen more often.

You're right, gail. I hope this won't become a new trend in terrorism.

According to ABC news this morning,the
watrers off the coast of Somalia are
ripe for pirates/terrorists.Not sure why
Seabourn did not know this.

According to what I heard today - the muslim terrorists were looking to board and shoot Americans. The ship was 100 miles off shore- seems like a safe enough distance to not expect trouble.

They should shoot to kill.

Don't want anyone climbing over my balcony !!!

I don't know about it being muslim terrorists, all of the stories I heard said the group was looking to steal food supplies, and that is a common occurence in those waters.

From the linked article above:

On Thursday, the United Nations' World Food Program warned that hijackings off the coast of Somalia were restricting the delivery of needed food assistance to the country.

&quot;The southern Somali coastline is one of the most dangerous in the world,&quot; the WFP said on its Web site. &quot;In recent months, WFP's operations in Somalia have been sabotaged by the hijackings of two vessels carrying relief food. Ship owners are now demanding armed escorts to travel in these waters.&quot;

The cruise routes through Suez Canal and down the African coast to Mombasa, so it's impossible to not be close to Somalia as the ship takes that turn out of the Red Sea/Gulf of Aden into the Indian Ocean.

Cargo ships were attacked before by the Somalian pirates, but this is the first time a cruise ship was. All the reports point to economic piracy, not a terrorist attack. I know it's a fine line, but mostly these pirates attack food supply ships, a very lucrative and powerful currency in that part of the world.

It would be very interesting to know what the cruise lines have in place on the various ships in the way of arms, trained para-military personnel, etc. I bet there is a lot we cruisers don't know about down there in those holds in the way of arms and the means to fight off intruders. At least we can hope so. I would like to know that there is a trained cadre of crew members that can and will used weapons to fight off any attempt to board the ship. Anyone have inside info on this subject?

Many of the cruiselines hires ex-members of British military unit entirely manned by Gurkhas. The Nepalese nationals form a brigade unit in the regular British Army that is probably the most decorated unit in the entire British Army. Fearless fighters, trained to the highest standards, almost to a special forces level. It still exists today. They are deployed all over the world by the British Army, including Afghanistan. It's somewhat of an equivalent of the French Foreign Legion, except they all come from the same area.

During regular operations on a cruise ship these guys are the engine room/maintenance guys.

If a true all out attack occurs these guys would be able to hold of pretty much anybody for at least few hours until some kind of re-enforcements would be able to reach them.

For obvious reasons, it's always better not to get into fight with the attackers and if possible outrun them as the captain did in this accident. When you have hundreds or thousands passengers on board, you want to minimize any fighting. BUT, if the only option was to actually fight, these guys would teach a lesson or 2 to the attackers.

In CNN it is reported that the ship deployed a sonic blast weapon;
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/africa....ap/index.html