Guanabara: Japan to try pirates of Crude Carrier

Japan will try Guanabara pirates. A Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyer carrying the seven-member team is scheduled to bring the four onboard at an Omani port before transporting them to Djibouti, from where a Japan Coast Guard airplane will take them to Japan. MSDF’s Kirisame (DD-104) and Yudachi (DD-103) destroyers are deployed in the Gulf of Aden The Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office dispatched a total of seven prosecutors, interpreters and clerks to Oman. The Japanese prosecutors are interviewing the 24 crew members of the tanker.

It would be the first transfer of pirates to Japan since the creation of the country's antipiracy law in 2009, and legal experts are watching closely how Tokyo will deal with the captured pirates as there are no widely recognized international rules on handling them. mainichi

At approximately 3.00pm local time, Mar. 5, the oil tanker MV Guanabara reported it was under attack when it was 328 nautical miles south east of Duqm, Oman. Bulkeley, assigned to CMF’s counter-piracy mission Combined Task Force (CTF) 151 was directed to intercept Guanabara, supported by the Turkish warship TCG Giresun of NATO’s counter-piracy Task Force 508.

Following confirmation from Guanabara’s master that the suspected pirates were on board and his crew had taken refuge in the ship’s “citadel”, Bulkeley’s specialist boarding team, supported overhead by its embarked SH-60 helicopter, secured the Bahamian-flagged vessel and detained four men.
Navy Guanabara is registered in the Bahamas as owned by Peninsula Transport and managed by Mol Tank Shipmanagement Europe. The officers and crew are of varied nationalities. Distance from Duqm, Oman to Port of Djibouti is 1117 nm.


The Japanese government agreed to accept the four suspected pirates from U.S. authorities. But now, government officials are rushing through their preparations, studying when to execute an arrest warrant and how to collect evidence.

After consulting with the Justice Ministry, the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office hastily sent prosecutors to Oman, close to the attack site, on March 8.

Japan's burden, including costs, to transfer and provide interpreters is expected to be heavy.

Officials of the Japan Coast Guard, in charge of transporting and questioning the suspects, are already worried that more suspected pirates might follow.

Questioning crew members for evidence will not be easy because the tanker, on its way to China, is not scheduled to make a port call in Japan.

A trial could also pose many difficulties because both the victims and suspects are non-Japanese. The anti-piracy law provides for life imprisonment as a punishment, meaning their case could be tried by lay judges.

"Because they speak many different languages, it would be difficult for citizen judges," a senior prosecution official said.

There are even concerns that it could be impossible to determine whether the accused are adults. In a similar trial in Germany, none of the suspected pirates knew their exact age.
Asahi Shimbun Similar difficulties have been faced by South Korea's law enforcement authorities in dealing with a gang of five suspected pirates. The men were transferred to South Korea after being captured by South Korean commandos off Somalia in January.
The latest government response to the piracy issue also has brought to light the fact that Japan's legal system does not yet have clear-cut provisions on how to deal with pirates captured abroad. The handover of the pirates, if carried out, will raise such questions as the high cost of arranging such transfers.

M. Star: 23 m.-wide dent 16 m. BELOW waterline

MT M. Star entered Tokyo Bay Aug. 24. The mysterious impact left one 11-meter-wide, one-meter-deep dent in the aft starboard hull about six meters above the waterline, and another 23-meter-wide dent about 16 meters below the waterline, and damage to the ship's mess. more here

M. Star: 2 small vessels in the purported attack?

Two small unidentified ships were near the Japanese tanker that was damaged in a suspected attack in the Strait of Hormuz in late July.

The two small ships changed directions many times and made other suspicious moves, raising the possibility that they may have been involved in the purported attack.

The Japan Transport Safety Board, a body under the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, and the state-run National Maritime Research Institute are currently analyzing the radar images left in the tanker's data recorder, the sources said.

The National Police Agency's National Research Institute of Police Science is also checking substances collected from the damaged part of the tanker to see if they were components of an explosive.
earlier more here

M. Star: terrorist scenario in doubt: So it goes

If it were a suicide bomber, the explosive device would have pierced the hull or at least caused visible damage from shrapnel. The terrorist theory is the favoured scenario because the United Arab Emirates state news agency quoted an unnamed coast guard official as saying they found the remnants of handmade explosives on the hull and that terrorists were to blame. The Japanese government, meanwhile, is still carrying out its investigations into the cause of the blast on board the M Star, a government official said. The Straits are far outside of the operational radius that one would expect for a group that was operating in the Sinai to be able to then launch an attack in the Persian Gulf - that's showing quite a transnational operational reach. The damage to the M Star's hull was probably caused by a collision?

M. Star: genie is out of the bottle?

Spencer Ackerman as attackerman at firedoglake

The attack on the M Star was poorly executed, without powerful or sophisticated enough explosive to breech the hull or even sink the ship. But I wonder if now this genie is out of the bottle. With better funding and an experienced bomb-maker, as they used against the USS Cole in 2000 and the Limburg in 2002, the outcome might have been much more serious – a massive spill, or even a sunken supertanker in the Strait. Shipping is a very soft target, impossible to defend, and the western economy is very sensitive to increases in the price of crude oil. The Persian Gulf, especially the Strait of Hormuz is a natural choke point, through which something on the order of a quarter of the world’s crude oil is shipped. If last week’s attack had caused a major spill or actually sunk the M Star, the price of oil would have to go up as shipping out of the Gulf would be slowed, reduced and insurance costs would skyrocket. An extended campaign that could have the effect of driving up the cost of oil at a time when the US and Europe are struggling with fragile, damaged economies would be disastrous, even if operationally it met with little success.

M. Star: Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman redux

"UAE explosives experts who collected and examined samples found a dent on the starboard side above the water line and remains of home-made explosives on the hull,
Probably the tanker had encountered a terrorist attack from a boat loaded with explosives,"
Abdullah Azzam Brigades is a name of convenience rather than an actual organisation. Their stated aim is the release of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a controversial blind Muslim cleric, from a US jail for his part in the 1993 World Trade Center attack.

M. Star: Ayyub Al Tayshan?

Privately, U.S. officials have expressed skepticism about the al Qaeda-affiliated group's claim of responsibility. They say that while the investigation isn't finished, the visible damage to the tanker hull is more consistent with a collision than a terrorist attack.
a Dolphin class submarine have passed through Suez. here A report in the London Sunday Times 30 May said that Israel was placing submarines off the coast of Iran. According to the report, three submarines have already arrived in the Persian Gulf, and one will be permanently stationed there. The deployment is Israel's response to Iran's development of ballistic missiles, the report said.
"After midnight last Wednesday, the martyr hero Ayyub Al Tayshan blew himself up in the Japanese oil tanker M. Star in the Strait of Hormuz between the U.A.E. and Oman,"In a statement posted on a militant website and dated Aug. 2, by the Abdullah Azzam Brigades.

M. Star: :military expert hired by mol

MOL has hired a military expert has been hired to lead the investigation into determining the cause of the VLCC damage. U.S. navy's Bahrain-based fifth fleet team is carrying out diving operations to determine the extent of the damage to the oil tanker M.Star.
The investigation is commissioned by Mitsui O.S.K. Lines Ltd.

m. star: Iranian sub? Israeli

Speculation about an attack on a VLCC in the Straits of Hormuz:
The large square dent in the supertanker was caused by a rocket grenade?

Most officials dismissed the idea of a collision with a submarine, because no damaged sub is known to have surfaced. American officials reported no collision with United States submarines in the region. here. U.S. nuclear submarines have been in two collisions in the busy Strait of Hormuz since 2007, one involving a Japanese supertanker and the other a U.S. warship. The Dolphin class is a non-nuclear (SSK) type of submarine developed and constructed by Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft AG (HDW), Germany for the Israeli Navy. It is based on the export-only German 209 class submarines, but heavily modified and enlarged and is thus not seen as a member of the 209 family. The Dolphin boats are considered among the most sophisticated and capable conventional submarines in the world.[1] The Type 209 is a class of diesel-electric attack submarine developed exclusively for export in the late 1960s by Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft of Germany. Turkey has 209s. Iran has kilo-class subs,


It could also have been the bull nose end of a jetty at one of the loading ports where the tanker may have come into contact," here

earlier

M. Star: dent from a submarine collision?

U.A.E. port officials examining M. Star said it may have hit a submarine or a mine. earlier

M.Star: U.S. officials are watching the situation closely

Mitsui releases photos of explosion damage

“We have no information the tanker was attacked,” said State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley... The U.S. will continue to monitor developments, Crowley said. An explosion, which “may have been caused by an external attack,” occurred at 5:30 a.m. Tokyo time, injuring one of the crew, Mitsui said in a statement. The vessel, M. Star, was on its way to Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates to assess the damage and no oil is leaking, earlier