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"We will no longer expose our crew to the risk of being hijacked and held for ransom by pirates in the Gulf of Aden," said Terje Storeng, Odjell's president and chief executive. Experts say the much longer journey adds 12 to 15 days to a tanker's trip, at a cost of between $20,000-$30,000 a day. Abdullkadir Musa, the deputy sea port minister in northern Somalia's breakaway Puntland region, said if the ship tries to anchor anywhere near Eyl
-- where the U.S. earlier said it was heading -- then his forces will try to rescue it. Forces from Puntland have sometimes confronted pirates, though Somalia's weak central government, which is fighting Islamic insurgents, has been unable to mount a response to increasing piracy. Puntland forces, their guns blazing, freed a Panama-flagged cargo ship from pirates on Oct. 14. The Dubai-based owner of the Saudi tanker, Vela International Marine Ltd., said the oil tanker's 25 crew members "are believed to be safe." The statement made no mention of a ransom or contacts with the bandits. The Sirius Star's cargo is worth about $100 million at current prices, but the pirates have no known way to unload it from the tanker. In Vienna, Ehsan Ul-Haq, chief analyst at JBC Energy, said the seizure was not affecting oil prices, since traders were focused instead on "the overall economy." The U.S. Navy is still surrounding a Ukrainian ship loaded with tanks and other weaponry that was seized by pirates Sept. 25 off the Somali coast. Surk contributed to this report from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. AP writers Mohamed Olad Hassan in Mogadishu, Somalia, and Slobodan Lekic in Brussels, Belgium contributed to this report.
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