The U.S. military says pirates have shot and killed four Americans aboard a hijacked yacht off the coast of Somalia.
U.S. Vice Admiral Mark Fox told reporters that U.S. naval forces were trying to negotiate the hostages’ release Tuesday when, without any warning, pirates fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a U.S. warship.
Fox said the grenade missed, but sailors then heard gunfire aboard the yacht, the SV Quest.
U.S. Special Forces boarded the hijacked vessel and discovered all four hostages had been shot by the pirates. Despite immediate medical care, the four Americans died of their wounds.
Fox said the boarding party seized control of the yacht, killing two pirates and detaining 15 others. Two other pirates were found dead on board.
Pirates hijacked the yacht on Friday and had been steering it toward the Somali coast, with four U.S. Navy warships trailing and observing the vessel.
This is believed to be the first time U.S. citizens have been killed by the pirate gangs operating off the Somali coast.
Media reports have identified the four Americans killed as yacht owners Scott and Jean Adam of Marina del Rey, California, and Phyllis Macay and Bob Riggle of Seattle, Washington.
Why are these guys the world’s second dumbest pirates?
A US Frigate looks like this –
Look Ma! No Cannons!
So – other than the large white numeric designation on the bow which is a dead giveaway that this is a warship and not the “Betty Boop” tramp steamer out of Kalamazoo, one might mistake this American Warship for a harmless merchant ship from miles away.
Some of these Pirate’s bretheren attacked a French Warship which looks like this on the right –
Things That go Boom! French Frigate Somme
For future reference, the little dome at the front with the “pipe” sticking out of it… Is a cannon.
The Tabar, An Indian Navy Frigate
Russian Missile Cruiser, Peter the Great
Out of the running (self-Darwin elimination) for World’s Dumbest Pirates are the Somali Pirates who attacked an Indian and a had a tango with a Russian warship…
This one sounds a bit flaky. Sort of like previous cases of a mysterious black man murdering a husband or wife – or the recent “acid attack” in Seattle…
Appears that Mexicans have become official black people.
Wouldn’t be surprised on this one if the woman didn’t kill her husband, or was involved in drug smuggling… And blame it on “dem Mex’cans”!
Dodging gunfire from pirates on a Texas-Mexico border lake, Tiffany Hartley was forced to make an impossible choice: risk her life by staying with her husband or return to land and seek help.
The couple were sightseeing on Jet Skis on the Mexican side of Falcon Lake on Thursday when Hartley says several boats of gunmen opened fire, striking her husband in the back of his head.
A recording of her 911 call released this weekend and reports from law enforcement officials detail the tragic incident.
“He was thrown off the Jet Ski and I couldn’t pick him up to get him on mine,” Hartley, 29, told the 911 dispatcher after she safely made it to shore. “Oh, God.”
Texas authorities believe David Hartley, 30, died in the attack.
“[Tiffany Hartley] said she was seeing bullets hitting close to her in the water and realized that her husband had been hit behind the head,” Zapata County, Texas, Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez Jr. told ABC News. “She went back trying to find, trying to help him. She went in the water trying to load up her husband to her Jet Ski … trying to get his body and Jet Ski back to the U.S. side. She was being shot at so she finally had to let go of the body, climb back in her Jet Ski and head back over here to the United States.”
Hartley told police that the armed men, who Gonzalez said he believes are pirates associated with a Mexican drug cartel, chased her into U.S. waters as she fled.
“I’m alive because of God’s protection. There is no other reason,” she told The Denver Post.
Officials are still searching Falcon Lake for David Hartley’s body, according to Fox News.
“The one thing I dreaded on Falcon Lake has happened,” said the Zapata County sheriff. “The lake is not secure, the border is not secure because the incident that I dreaded the most has in fact happened. We cannot go to Mexico, we cannot recover that body, we cannot conduct an investigation, we have to tell the family we can’t do anything about it.”
A group of Somali pirates seized by Russian forces and then freed never made it to land and are probably dead, according to Russian authorities. The pirates, captured after the Russian navy freed a hijacked oil tanker last week, were released hundreds of miles from shore in an inflatable boat with no navigational equipment, the Wall Street Journal reports.
A Russian Defense Ministry spokesman says radio signals from the boat vanished an hour afterwards. Somali pirate commanders have threatened to harm any Russian citizens they find aboard hijacked ships in revenge for the Russian operation. Russia says it freed the pirates because of “imperfections” in international law, although many in the Russian media speculate that they were killed instead of freed. The lack of an international court to try pirates means “we’ll have to do what our forefathers did when they met the pirates ,” Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said before Russian forces stormed the tanker.