Piracy Victims Blame the Media
The crew of the Maersk Alabama is confined by the FBI to their ship in Mombasa's harbor. But they gave a deckside press conference today, and accused the media of risking their lives.
A man who identified himself as the ship's chief engineer went on a difficult-to-understand rant in which he appeared to say that the media's reporting that the Maersk Alabama was headed to port in Mombasa after being liberated by the Navy put both the Navy and the ship's crew at risk of further pirate attacks.
The rant was sparked when reporters asked for details of how the crew escaped with the ship. "I don't want to get into the details of it," one unidentified crew member said, "because it could compromise future crews that get attacked by these assholes from Somalia."
Then the chief engineer piped up:
If you hear what happened, there's things that you cannot publish in this process.... We found out that things were published that jeopardized us. When I got to sleep after 33 hours of this stress, when we went to sleep for a few moments, and we got up, the Navy was terrified, because they had already known who they were, how many they were, where we were, where we were going. It was publicized. Those people are coordinated out there. It's not a pirate boat here and there—it's an organization. And we were terrified. They operate right outside here. And now they're on the way to get us. The Navy, at gunpoint, made us leave almost. We were not leaving him, but they convinced us we had to leave, so we left, all under good faith. And then the Navy got jeopardized. Those young men came here to save us.... They were fantastic. And then, right out from underneath them, the media jeopardized their lives. Again, our lives went back into the frying pan. Because we're running into more waters we're they're known to operate.
He may have been talking about reports like this, which indicated the Maersk Alabama's destination after leaving the waters where Capt. Phillips was detained on a lifeboat. Information like that could have helped the pirates intercept the ship again, though it's hard to imagine such an attempt, since the ship was under Navy guard. It's also hard to imagine that the U.S. Navy would be "terrified" about pirate attacks.