“Pirates”, possibly migrants, tried on Friday to hijack a Turkish ship heading for France off Naples, provoking the intervention of Italian special forces, the Italian Ministry of Defense said.
“An operation is underway on a ship on board which pirates have boarded. The illegal immigrants have used dagger-type weapons” to threaten the crew, Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto told the press.
The situation remained confused at the beginning of the evening but a government source indicated that the Italian special forces had regained control of the situation.
Intervention on the ship
The ship is a Turkish-flagged ro-ro ship, the Galata Seaways, which left Topcular in Turkey on June 7 bound for Sète, in southern France, where it was due to arrive on Saturday with 22 crew members, according to Italian media.
Off Naples, in southern Italy, an unknown number of armed men threatened and “captured” the crew in the command cabin. The cargo ship then “significantly deviated from its trajectory”, underlines the Ansa agency.
Two Navy helicopters, as well as means from the coastguards and the customs police were involved in the operation. The helicopter-borne special forces of the Navy invested the ship and arrested some assailants, but the inspection of the boat continued to find possible accomplices.
The Italian authorities were contacted by their Turkish counterparts, alerted by the captain of the ship. The ship was in the port of Naples on Friday evening, according to real-time data from the site marinetraffic.com.
The Turkish merchant ship Galata Seaways in Capri waters near Naples, Italy. [Cesare Abbate / EPA – Keystone]
Possible migrants
The daily La Repubblica reports that 16 crew members were sheltered, as well as three “passengers”, while some illegal immigrants “barricaded themselves at the bottom of the hold”.
According to the newspaper, the assailants, about fifteen, would be migrants wishing to reach Europe who would have embarked clandestinely in Turkey before being discovered by the crew.
According to the government source contacted, the attackers could indeed be migrants, but it was not immediately possible to know where and when they boarded the cargo ship.
Giorio Mulé, vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies, congratulated the forces mobilized for having “secured a Turkish ship sailing in Italian territorial waters which had been diverted by a group of armed men”.
agencies/iar
