The US Navy said it apprehended nine suspected pirates after responding to a distress signal from the Indian-flagged vessel Premdivya which said it was fired upon by men in a nearby skiff who were trying to board their vessel.
In a statement from the 5th Fleet's Bahrain headquarters, the Navy said a helicopter from the USS Vella Gulf fired two warning shots at the pirates in order to stop them from fleeing. When authorities boarded the skiff and searched it, they found weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades, and the suspected pirates were taken aboard the USS Vella Gulf.
A day earlier US forces operating in the area arrested seven suspected pirates - the Navy's first arrest since a new US anti-piracy task force was established this year.
The seven pirates apprehended Wednesday were transferred via helicopter from the Vella Gulf to the USNS Lewis and Clark Thursday. Associated Press television footage showed some of the men, all handcuffed and wearing leg shackles and white jumpsuits, being escorted from helicopters onto the ship.
The men, who were not allowed to talk to each other, were given a meal, a blanket and a towel and bar of soap with which to take a shower. With the help of a translator, US forces were trying to get information from the men such as their ages and nationalities.
The men were then to be taken to a makeshift holding area surrounded by razor wire, where they were watched by American forces.
The seven were apprehended after the US Navy responded to a distress call from the Marshal Islands-flagged Polaris which said men in a skiff had tried to board their vessel using a ladder. An American ship raced to the location where US troops apprehended the pirates, who were armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades.
Associated Press television footage also showed pictures of the boat the men used while trying to take the ship hostage, a small skiff that was lifted by crane onto the Lewis and Clark.
According to Lt. Nathan Christensen, a spokesman for the 5th Fleet, those seven will eventually be handed over to Kenya. The United States announced an agreement last month allowing for suspected pirates to be handed over to Kenya.
Officials are gathering more information and evidence on Thursday's incident so they could turn the suspects over to authorities for prosecution, most likely also to Kenya as well, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said.
Pirates, mostly from the lawless Somalia, have become an increasing problem in the region. They've targeted a number of ships including the MV Faina, a Ukrainian cargo ship carrying tanks and other heavy weapons, that was taken hostage last September and released last week.
The Ukrainian ship docked in Kenya Thursday.
The 20 Russian and Ukrainian sailors only spoke briefly to journalists assembled on the docks in Kenya's port city of Mombasa before being driven away for medical checks.
"It is very difficult to express our feelings because the voyage is too hard for everybody," said the acting captain, Viktor Nikolsky, in heavily accented English.
The ship's original captain died of a suspected heart attack during the kidnapping. Officials said the sailors who spent so many months in proximity to a corpse had to be thoroughly checked over.
The capture of the Ukrainian ship immediately sparked a diplomatic spat, after a Kenyan maritime official and various foreign diplomats in Nairobi said the weapons were destined for neighboring southern Sudan, not Kenya.
The allegations embarrassed Kenya, which had helped broker a peace deal between the northern government and oil-rich south Sudan in 2005, ending a 21 year civil war. Several officials Thursday firmly repeated that the tanks were Kenya's.
"We have nothing to hide," government spokesman Alfred Mutua told the banks of television cameras assembled to see the arriving sailors.
Their ordeal began last September, when scores of heavily armed Somali pirates swarmed onboard the MV Faina as it carried 33 Soviet-designed tanks and crates of small arms to Kenya. Foreign governments had feared the Faina's weapons might fall into the hands of Somali insurgents that the US State Department says are linked to al-Qaida.
The crew are expected to return to Ukraine on a specially chartered flight on Saturday.
Last year, pirates seeking multimillion-dollar ransoms attacked 111 ships in the Gulf of Aden and seized 42 of them.
In an effort to stop the pirates and protect commercial shipping, warships from a number of countries including the United States, India, Britain, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and South Korea have sent ships to the area.
Somalia has not had a functioning government since warlords overthrew dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, then turning on each other and reducing the Horn of Africa nation to anarchy and chaos.
