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Maersk Alabama Hijacking Research Paper

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Maersk Alabama Hijacking Many people have seen the movie Captain Phillips, but almost all of those people do not know the real story. Between the days of April 8-12, 2009, captain Richard Phillips was taken captive by pirates. It all started when a small boat of four pirates from Somalia managed to get aboard the cargo ship, Maersk Alabama. They gathered the crew members and demanded they take the ship. To save the rest of the crew members Captain Richard Phillips said that they could take him if hostage if they left the rest of the crew alone, so the pirates took the captain into the lifeboat and left for Somalia. For four days, the navy and many other rescue teams had been trying to negotiate to get the captain. Because Somalia was stealing …show more content…

“In 2010 alone, the collective cost of ransom money, military protection and cargo insurance as a result of piracy is estimated to have been between 7 and 12 billion dollars”(Kellerman). That’s a lot of money just for one country, in one year. Also, the crew members of the ship were not properly armed for an occasion like this. But if they were, in this case they were not able to get to them, based on the fact that the pirates were greatly outnumbered by five times their numbers. No one knows exactly what happened before the pirates took over the ship, but we can only guess they came from a stolen fishing boat. First, the pirates first radioed the ship, demanding they stop. The captain decided to speed up to try and outrun them. This time, it worked. Although, the second time, the pirates took a speedboat up to the ship and managed to get aboard. The pirates have been stealing ships for a very long time. “With their huge hulls and decks, many modern container ships have enough room for over 6,000 containers.”(Gibbs). This was most likely the reason they went after the Maersk Alabama. This time, three pirates were planning on going out to sea to find any ships they could. As they were leaving, a boy from a school a little distance away came up to them asking if he could come along. The pirates agreed, taking any help they could get. “Pirates …show more content…

After the other pirates were shot, Abdulwali was arrested. Before his trial, there was some debate between his attorneys about whether or not he was also a hostage. “Defense attorneys Deidre von Dorum and Philip Weinstein said that they had not yet established whether their client Muse was himself a hostage of other pirates and that if he were that it would change the circumstances, perhaps making him eligible for wartime conventions.”(Esposito et al). If he was, this could reduce his sentence dramatically. However, because their was no way to truly prove he was a hostage, Abdulwali’s sentence would not be reduced. Other than the jail sentence, there was no huge impact on society but this event definitely opened people’s eyes about how dangerous it really is out on the

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