Pirates Attack Cruise Ship

NAIROBI, Kenya — The pirates who attacked a luxury cruise liner off Somalia's coast were likely to have been from the same group that hijacked a U.N.-chartered vessel in June and held its crew and food aid hostage for 100 days, a maritime official said Sunday.

Two boats full of pirates approached the Seabourn Spirit about 100 miles off the Somali coast Saturday and fired rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles while the heavily armed bandits tried to get onboard.

The ship escaped by shifting to high speed and changing course. Its passengers, mostly Americans with some Australians and Europeans, were gathered in a lounge for safety, and nobody was injured, said Bruce Good, spokesman for the Miami-based Seabourn Cruise Line, a subsidiary of Carnival Corp.

Andrew Mwangura, head of the Kenyan chapter of the Seafarers Assistance Program, said the location of the attack would indicate the pirates were probably from a group that seized a U.N.-chartered ship on a humanitarian mission on June 27.

Somalia has had no effective central government since opposition leaders ousted dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. The leaders then turned on each other, transforming the nation of 7 million into a patchwork of battling fiefdoms ruled by heavily armed militias.

AP Polkonline.com, 2005.