Navy steps up Arabian Sea patrol, adds 5 more warships
Ajay Banerjee
New Delhi, January 8
Stepping up its fight against piracy in the Arabian Sea, the Indian Navy has doubled the deployment of warships on patrol duty to keep the economically vital sea trade safe from pirates and from attacks by Houthi rebels based out of Yemen.
Hi-tech surveillance
- All warships are carrying helicopters and are connected via satellite to operations room
- Besides having marine commandos on board, these warships have the equipment to launch or thwart an attack
The Navy now has 10 warships in the Arabian Sea, doubling the deployment over the past 10 days. In the beginning of December last year, the Navy had two warships in the Arabian Sea for anti-piracy duties. The number was gradually hiked to five by the third week of December and now there are 10 warships on the high seas.
All these ships are carrying helicopters and are connected via satellite to the naval operations room. Besides having marine commandos on board, the warships are fortified with equipment to launch or thwart an attack.
The maritime surveillance planes, including the Boeing P8I and Predator drones, are on constant surveillance from air, scanning the area and flagging all suspicious vessels. The warships have been tasked to watch out for rogue ships sailing mid-sea which could be used by pirates to launch drone attacks. Pirates have been operating out of Somalia in Africa, but now attacks are taking place far from the coast, adding to the suspicion of the role of rogue ships. Dozens of suspicious vessels have been boarded and searched by the Navy in the past two weeks, sources said.
The warships first warn a suspicious vessel and then marine commandos get on with the task of physically checking the vessel. And all this while, a helicopter hovers above. A ship can be dubbed “suspicious” if it has not reached its port of call and has been sailing for days within a specific area, said an official.
The recent pirate attack on merchant vessel Lila Norfolk on January 4 was 850 km east of Africa’s Somalian coast. A bunch of pirates with small speedboats could not have carried this out, indicating that a rogue ship must have been used to launch the pirates.
On December 23, MV Chem Pluto was hit by a possible drone, again raising suspicion of the use of a rouge ship to launch missiles or drones.
MV Chem Pluto got hit some 400 km west of India off the coast of Porbandar. The spot was 926 km away from the Iranian coast and 1,502 km from the Yemen coast. A strike so far out at sea would need high-end technology or else a rogue ship to launch it.
The US blamed Iran for launching a “self-destructing” drone on MV Chem Pluto, an allegation denied by the Iranian Foreign Ministry as “worthless accusation”.
