On 4 July the owners of the 1,321 gt Moresby 9 contacted the Information Fusion Centre (IFC) in Singapore to say that an unknown number of men had boarded the vessel at roughly 1938hrs local time, 34 nm from the Anambas Islands, in Indonesian waters, according to an alert from the ReCAAP Information Sharing Centre. The vessel was a carrying a 2,200 tonne cargo of MGO.
Regional maritime authorities were alerted with the Malaysia Maritime Enforcement Agency on standby, while the Indonesia Navy searched the area of the last known position of the tanker but were unable to locate the vessel.
“The shipping company managed to establish communications with Moresby 9 and is currently conducting an investigation of what had occurred onboard the tanker,” ReCAAP said. It did not say where the tanker was located when contact was re-established.
It is the second incident in a year involving the Moresby 9. “Notably, Moresby 9 had a previous incident in 2013, but siphoning of fuel was foiled by the presence of MMEA assets at the location of the incident causing the robbers to escape without siphoning the fuel,” ReCAAP said.
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