Pirates strike again...or do they? (UPDATE)

[UPDATE 9/28--this entry kind of rambles along with several updates as I found new stuff. I'm still not sure what it all means yet, but I'll cut to the chase: one possibility is that the Norks used the pretense of Somali pirate attacks to do an "extreme makeover" of one of their freighters---changing it from a North Korean flagged ship into a Sierra Leonean flagged ship. Why? Well, possibly so it could smuggle bad stuff to Syria undetected. I've got another report in an update of their fooling around with another ship's flag and registry to do exactly that.

Or maybe it's just pirates whacking a Nork freighter, which is interesting right there. Arrr!]

The Infinity Marine 1, a Panama-flagged cargo ship with a crew of 22 hands, set sail from Dubai in June. It was last seen in Somali waters on June 26th.

The vessel, sailing from the United Arab Emirates, was carrying general cargo including food stuffs, iron sheet, generators, batteries, white wood and light vehicles.

Four vessels - one from Taiwan, another from Denmark and two from South Korea - are already currently in the hands of pirates off the coast of war-torn Somalia.

Now, given that there's all kinds of pirate activity in Somalia, I'm sure that's the reason for this:

In June, maritime officials said a North Korean vessel, MV Sea Prince, also went missing in the Horn of Africa waters after after loading cargo in Djibouti port.

The MV Sea Prince, which flies a South Korean flag, was last seen at Somalia’s northern port of Berbera on May 11, said Andrew Mwangura, coordinator of the Kenya chapter of the Seafarers’ Assistance Program. Its owners and agents have lost contact with it since.

Different reports on Google give registrations to both countries. Which is it? Or is it either one?

Elsewhere reports show that the missing North Korean cargo ship MV Sea Prince changed her name to RUSALKA and flag to Sierra Leone on May 11th in Berbera, Somalia.

This indicates that the ship is up for no good and she does not like to be found.

It is not known how many crew were on board the 2,426 grt Sea Prince when she left Djibouti on 11May destined for the Northern Somali ports of Berbera and Bossaso with 2,400 tons of cereals.

Andrew Mwangura
Programs Co-ordinator
Seafarers’ Assistance Program

A Rusalka is a ghost, in Russian folklore, of a girl who died a violent death near the water. Odd name for a ship, don't you think?

One wonders whether we have witnessed another Pong Su. One also wonders whether that had something to do with this.

Or maybe it's just, you know, pirates.

UPDATE: There's certainly a precedent for this kind of name-switch. (I'm adding this text approx. 8pm PST because I think it's important):

Online databases tracking a ship reportedly flying a North Korean flag that docked in Syria have changed their records following a report in The Washington Post linking the alleged Israeli air strike in Syria to a North Korean shipment.

Ronen Solomon, who searches information in the public domain for companies, told Haaretz he found references to a ship called Al Hamad on three different Web sites after the initial reports of the Israeli raid in Syria on September 6. These included the official sites of Syria's Tartous Port and the Egyptian Transportation Ministry.

Two of the three sites said the ship was flying a North Korean flag, and the third site reported it was flying a South Korean flag.

...

Saturday, the Washington Post published an article citing an American Mideast expert, who said a shipment that arrived in Syria three days before the alleged Israel Air Forces strike was labeled as cement, but that Israel believed it carried nuclear equipment.

Following the Washington Post report, Solomon returned to the three sites, and discovered that all mentions of the North Korean flag on Al Hamad had been deleted, and that the ship's flag was now registered as 'unknown.'

Maybe this was another shipment.

UPDATE II: There's no record of a ship named "Rusalka" in the e-ships database. It does, however, confirm that the Sea Prince is (was?) North Korean.

UPDATE III, 11:38 PM: Heh. Fiction is stranger than truth:

Marianna is a spy for CROM, a organization concerned with weapons of mass destruction. Three scientists suspected of creating these weapons have gone missing, and she has good reason to believe that they’re on the Rusalka, a Russian ship that is the headquarters of Grishin Enterprises International, and home to it’s founder, Arkady Grishin.