Mombasa (Kenya): An American ship captain was freed unharmed on Sunday in a US navy operation that killed three of the four Somali pirates who had been holding him for days in a lifeboat off the coast of Africa, a senior US intelligence official said.
One of the pirates was wounded and is in custody after a swift firefight, the official said. Capt Richard Phillips, 53, of Underhill, Vermont, was safely transported to a US navy warship nearby.
The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
A government official and others in Somalia with knowledge of the situation had reported hours earlier that negotiations for Phillips’s release had broken down.
The district commissioner of the central Mudug region said talks went on all day Saturday, with clan elders from his area talking by satellite telephone and through a translator with Americans, but collapsed late on Saturday night.
“The negotiations between the elders and American officials have broken down. The reason is American officials wanted to arrest the pirates in Puntland and elders refused the arrest of the pirates,” said the commissioner, Abdi Aziz Aw Yusuf. He said he organized initial contacts between the elders and the Americans.
Two other Somalis, one involved in the negotiations and another in contact with the pirates, also said the talks collapsed because of the U.S. insistence that the pirates be arrested and brought to justice.
Phillips’s crew of 19 American sailors reached safe harbor in Kenya’s northeast port of Mombasa on Saturday night under guard of US Navy Seals, exhilarated by their freedom but mourning the absence of Phillips, whose bravery they praised repeatedly. Crew members said their ordeal had begun with the Somali pirates hauling themselves up from a small boat bobbing on the surface of the Indian Ocean far below.
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