The tanker “Asana” was hijacked in the Gulf of Aden. The crew are currently being held by pirates. There are also German crew members on board.
After the chemical tanker was hijacked by pirates off the coast of Yemen at the end of last week, the vessel was taken to the Puntland region on the north-eastern coast of Somalia. The pirates are currently holding the tanker’s crew captive there.
According to reports from local residents to the Reuters news agency, 20 crew members are being held on board. Eight of them are German, and ten are Filipino. One of the residents, who described himself as a former pirate, claimed to have seen the ship being supplied with food. There have been no reports so far of any injuries or fatalities.
The 127-metre-long “Asana” (6,441 GRT) was built in 1992 and flies the Tanzanian flag. At the time of the attack, the tanker was several nautical miles south of the province of Hadramaut. The UK Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) initially reported that a vessel in the Gulf of Aden had been boarded by “unauthorised persons” and classified the incident as a hijacking.
The Horn of Africa, home to Somalia – widely regarded as a “failed state” – has been plagued by piracy for years. The situation reached a preliminary peak in 2011, when a total of 250 attacks on ships were reported, before the number declined rapidly. Since 2023, there have been reports of increased activity by several hundred pirates in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.
Piracy is thus a further source of instability for international shipping, which has always used the route through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. Added to this is the Strait of Hormuz, a theatre of the Middle East conflict between the US and Iran. More recently, there has also been a resurgence in the activities of the Houthi militia, which has attacked several ships since November 2023, in some cases causing them to sink.
