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Article: Saudi sailor from hijacked tanker returns home
- Article from:
- AP Worldstream
- Article date:
- January 20, 2009
- Author:
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It was a sunny November morning with a calm sea. Saudi sailor Hussein al-Hamza was napping after his night shift on the brand new supertanker Sirius Star, loaded with two million barrels of oil as it crossed the Indian Ocean.
But the sound of the alarm shook al-Hamza awake, and he rushed to join his fellow sailors on the deck.
"I looked down and saw eight Somali pirates in two boats, each about 18-feet-long," al-Hamza told The Associated Press in a brief phone interview late Monday, a couple of hours after his return to Saudi Arabia following the pirates' release of the ship on Jan. 9.
"They looked scary," added al-Hamza.
That was the beginning ...