Cruise ships a new target for pirates?

NAIROBI, Kenya — The luxury American cruise ship steaming across the Gulf of Aden with hundreds of well-heeled tourists just might have been too much for Somali pirates to resist.

But the six bandits, riding in two skiffs and firing rifle shots at the gleaming ship, were outrun in minutes when the captain of M/S Nautica gunned the engine and sped away, a spokesman for the company said Tuesday.

Still, the implications had the pirates hijacked the ship added a new dimension to the piracy scourge, as NATO foreign ministers groped for solutions at a meeting in Brussels and the United Nations extended a piracy-fighting mandate for another year.

The potential for ransom payments from the families of hundreds of rich tourists may encourage similar attempts, especially after the capture of a Ukrainian cargo ship and a Saudi oil tanker.

Sunday's attack on the M/S Nautica, reported Tuesday, also raises questions: What was a cruise ship doing in the pirate-infested waters of the Gulf of Aden? How many such targets are sailing these seas, and how can they be protected?

Even the pirates' motives were in question: They could simply have been testing the defenses of the massive ship, rather than making a real effort to hijack it.

A handful of Western ships can do little to prevent attacks in a vast sea, and without the right to board hijacked vessels, they can only watch as the booty is towed to port.

"It is very fortunate that the liner managed to escape," said Noel Choong, who heads the International Maritime Bureau's piracy-reporting center in Malaysia.

Some of the world's leading cruise companies said Tuesday they are considering changing their itineraries to avoid going near the coast of Somalia.

Cunard's public-relations manager Eric Flounders said the company has two liners, the Queen Mary 2 and Queen Victoria, scheduled to go through the Gulf of Aden in March but added the company "will obviously consider changing the itinerary" should the situation not improve.

Spokeswoman Michele Andjel said P&O Cruises is considering whether to reroute the Arcadia, which is due around the Gulf of Aden in January.

Lt. Nathan Christensen, a Bahrain-based spokesman for the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, said 21,000 ships cross the Gulf of Aden every year, but he did not know how many cruise liners are included in that figure. The gulf links the Mediterranean Sea, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean.

The Nautica was on a 32-day cruise from Rome to Singapore, with stops at ports in Italy, Egypt, Oman, Dubai, India, Malaysia and Thailand, according to Oceania's Web site. Choong said the ship was carrying 656 passengers and 399 crew members.

In New York on Tuesday, the U.N. Security Council extended for another year its authorization for countries to enter Somalia's territorial waters, with advance notice, and use "all necessary means" to stop piracy and armed robbery at sea.