Pirates Reportedly Demand Ransom After Captain Phillips Tried To Escape

This tugs on my heart strings. Damn, If only our snipers had their scopes on these arseholes heads, the standoff would have been over. This sucks testes.

A Somali negotiator said Friday pirates holding American ship captain Richard Phillips hostage want a $2 million ransom and are ready to kill Phillips if attacked.

The announcement by the unidentified Somali, who helped negotiate a ransom paid last year to pirates who seized a Ukrainian ship carrying tanks, comes the same day Phillips was recaptured after he made an escape attempt from the life boat where he is being held hostage.

The negotiator said he has spoken with a pirate leader on the ground in Somalia who is coordinating action on the lifeboat adrift in the Indian Ocean. He says the plan is to get the hostage to shore to negotiate from a better position.

Sometime overnight, captain Phillips got away for a short period, and jumped off the lifeboat in an attempt to swim away, probably managing to escape through the lifeboat's backdoor. The drama was witnessed at some distance by the U.S. Navy, but it reportedly happened so quickly they could not provide assistance.[WTF?]

Defense officials said that one of the pirates fired an automatic weapon when Phillips tried to swim to safet,[sic] but it was not clear whether the pirate fired at the fleeing hostage, or into the air.

Also on Friday officials said other pirates sought to reinforce their colleagues by sailing hijacked ships with other captives aboard to the scene of the standoff.[...]

Mohamed Samaw, a resident of the pirate stronghold in Eyl, Somalia, who claims to have a "share" in a British-owned ship hijacked Monday, said four foreign ships held by pirates are heading toward the lifeboat. A total of 54 hostages are on two of the ships — citizens of China, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, the Philippines, Tuvalu, Indonesia and Taiwan.

Terrorist pirates using hostages of other ships is certainly dangerous for us. Who in the hell knows how China, Russia, etc will react to save their hostages let alone Captain Phillips.

Getting Phillips to shore would be devastating, alQaeda linked al-Shabaab would undoubtedly join in.

Crossposted at Jawa Report