“THE crew of the multipurpose tug boat, Svitser Korsakov, signalled the seizure from the Gulf of Aden, off Somalia, at 1.17pm, on February 1,” sources at Sakhalin port authorities told Interfax.
It transpired that pirates had seized the ice-breaking tug, Svitser Korsakov, and kidnapped its six crewmen in the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia – an area known for piracy.
The Svitser Korsakov tug was en route to Sakhalin in Russia’s Far East, where it was to have been employed in the Sakhalin II development of the Piltun Astokhskoye and the Lunskoye fields in the Sea of Okhotsk. The new-build Svitser Korsakov, commissioned in January this year in Saint Petersburg, was to stop in Singapore.