Somali pirates hijack ship; 20 Americans aboard

Somali pirates on Wednesday hijacked a U.S.-flagged cargo ship with 20 American crew members onboard, according to the shipping company.

The 17,000-ton Maersk Alabama was carrying emergency relief to Mombasa, Kenya at the time it was hijacked, said Peter Beck-Bang, spokesman for the Copenhagen-based container shipping group A.P. Moller-Maersk.

In a statement, the company later confirmed that the U.S.-flagged vessel has 20 U.S. nationals onboard.

U.S. Navy spokesman Lt. Nathan Christensen said there were U.S. citizens aboard the ship, but he did not say how many.

The U.S. Navy confirmed tat a U.S.-flagged ship had been hijacked Wednesday at 0430GMT (12:30 a.m. EDT). Christensen said the attack happened about 280 miles (450 kilometers) southeast of Eyl, a town in the northern Puntland region of Somalia.

The ship is the sixth o be seized within a week, a rise that analysts attribute to a new strategy by Somali pirates operating far from the warships patrolling the Gulf of Aden.

Christensen said the closest U.S. ship at the time of the hijacking was 345 miles away.

"The area, the ship was taken in, is not where the focus ofour ships has been," Christensen told The Associated Press on the phone from the 5th Fleet's Mideast headquarters in Bahrain.

"The area we're patrolling is more than a million miles in size. Our ships cannot be everywhere at every time," Christensen said.