By Carlo Munoz
A deadly attack against a U.S. civilian ship by Somali pirates, which ended with the execution of four American citizens yesterday, was launched from a “mothership” located off the coast of East Africa, according to a senior Navy official.
Noting the investigation into the hijacking of the C.V. Quest was still underway, Vice Adm. Mark Fox, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, 5th Fleet confirmed the attack was launched from a mothership stationed somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
Four Americans who were on board the Quest— Jean and Scott Adam, Phyllis Mackay and Bob Riggle–were killed by Somali pirates yesterday morning, shortly before U.S. special operations forces attempted to board the ship. The attack on the Quest was the deadliest act of piracy to date in NAVCENT’s area of operations, according to Fox.
The FBI, with support from 5th Fleet, is working to uncover more details on how the mothership was used to support the hijacking, according to Fox. Further, there were “ongoing efforts” to locate and track the mothership vessel that the pirates used to stage the attack, he told reporters yesterday in a briefing from NAVCENT headquarters in Bahrain.
Fox declined to go into any specifics regarding possible counterpiracy operations the command may have planned against the mothership once it is located, but did note that unmanned aerial vehicles were used to track the Quest until U.S. warships could arrive on location.
Last month, Fox warned that the increased use of motherships–or converted merchant ships used as floating bases of operation–by Somali pirate gangs had become a serious issue to U.S. and coalition naval forces in the region.
The use of motherships has allowed Somali-based pirates to carry out attack ships in deeper waters, and exponentially increase the time they patrol those waters. In the case of the Quest, the “pirate action group” that carried out the attack had been operating miles from the country’s coastline, Fox said.
The expanded range of these pirate motherships has, at times, rendered the command’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets conducting anti-piracy operations obsolete, due to the limited range of those platforms.
“These ships go out…at much greater distances with much longer persistence than we have seen,” Fox said at a Jan. 26 Defense Writers Group breakfast in Washington. “So now [they are] 1,000 miles off the coast of Somalia…if I fly a P-3 out of Djibouti, he flies 1,300 nautical miles and comes back. That is his range. So they are going where we are not, where we do not have [a] persistent presence.”
To that end, command forces uncovered a mothership ship filled with enough munitions and supplies to support up to eight “pirate action groups” almost 1,000 miles off the Somali coastline last September, Fox said at the time.
Navy officials have also argued that to counteract the increased range and loiter time of East African privateers, the sea service needs to acquire more Littoral Combat Ships, which are designed specifically to fight in the littoral waterways that the pirates operate in.
The tense situation on board the Quest came to a head early yesterday morning, when the pirates on board the vessel fired a rocket-propelled grenade “with absolutely no warning” on USS Sterett (DDG-104) anchored 600 yards from the American vessel, Fox said during yesterday’s briefing.
Before a boarding party consisting of special operations forces could be launched, the pirates opened fire inside the ship, according to Fox. Once aboard, U.S. personnel cleared the lower decks of the Quest, killing two of the 17-man pirate force.
After a brief firefight, the U.S. boarding team took the remaining pirates into custody and upon completing the search of the ship, discovered the bodies of the four Americans.
The unprovoked attack on the Sterett, he added, took place after two members of the pirate gang had held in person meetings with U.S. officials aboard the warship to negotiate the terms of the hostages’ release. The NAVCENT chief could not comment on the details of those talks or whether they played a role in the attack on the Sterett or the killing of the American hostages. N