Six armed men board tanker off Mukalla and divert it toward Somalia, UKMTO says
Yemen Herald News 
MUKALLA, Yemen — Six armed men boarded a product tanker in the Gulf of Aden and diverted it toward Somalia, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations said Thursday.
The organisation said it received a report of the incident about 136 nautical miles east of Mukalla, on Yemen’s southern coast.
The tanker broadcast a distress call on VHF Channel 16 reporting that an unauthorised vessel was approaching as it travelled west through the Gulf of Aden, according to UKMTO.
UKMTO said later that six armed individuals had boarded the ship, taken control of it and were redirecting it toward Somalia. It gave no information on the condition of the crew.
Authorities are investigating, UKMTO said. Vessels in the area were advised to transit with caution and to report suspicious activity.
Maritime security sources identified the ship as the 32,200-deadweight-tonne product tanker Sibu 1, according to the trade publication gCaptain. Lloyd’s List also named the vessel as Sibu 1.
Lloyd’s List reported that the tanker’s automatic identification system transmitted a message reading “PIRATE ONBOARD HELP” before the ship altered course.
Tracking data cited by gCaptain showed the tanker had changed its declared destination to Port Sudan on Aug. 15 and entered the designated Somalia high-risk area at 1718 GMT on Aug. 19. Its last recorded position showed it moving west-southwest at about 9.3 knots.
Martin Kelly, head of advisory at EOS Risk Group, said the vessel is under sanction by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.
The tanker was designated in December 2025 as part of a wider action against ships the Treasury said were being used to evade restrictions on Iranian oil sales.
It was then named Seamull and managed by Qatrat Alnada Almasi Ship Management, a company based in the United Arab Emirates, according to the designation.
The Treasury said at the time that the ship had carried Iranian petroleum products, including naphtha and gasoil, on several occasions, and had called at ports in Yemen under Houthi control.
The advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran has listed the vessel among what it describes as Iran’s shadow fleet, Kelly said.
Kelly said the seizure, coming days after another hijacking in the same waters, points to a resurgence of Somali piracy in the Gulf of Aden.
The report came three days after eight armed men seized the cargo ship Lutuf off Somalia’s Puntland coast. UKMTO said that vessel was boarded about four nautical miles south of Mareeyo on Monday.
Both incidents occurred during the southwest monsoon, a season that ordinarily limits the range at which pirate skiffs can operate.
An assessment issued this year by the Joint Maritime Information Center said rough conditions offshore were restricting extended-range skiff operations, but that sheltered coastal waters continued to offer opportunities to pirate groups.
Two other vessels were hijacked off Somalia in April, the product tanker Honour 25 and the general cargo ship Sward.
Mukalla is the capital of Hadramout governorate and the main Yemeni port on the Arabian Sea, east of the approaches to the Gulf of Aden. The city was held by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula for a year until 2016, when Yemeni and Emirati forces retook it.
The waters off southern Yemen carry a substantial share of the traffic moving between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean.
Shipping in the wider region has faced two separate threats over the past two years. One is piracy originating from the Somali coast, which is criminal and directed at ransom. The other is the campaign of attacks on merchant vessels in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab strait attributed to Yemen’s Houthi movement, which the movement has said is tied to the war in Gaza.
Yemeni government officials have said the two threats compound each other by stretching the naval forces patrolling the corridor. The Houthis have rejected characterisations of their campaign as piracy.
Several vessels have been seized in the region this year, in a period that has coincided with the crisis around the Strait of Hormuz and with renewed attacks on merchant shipping attributed to the Houthis, according to gCaptain.
The International Maritime Organization opened the 137th session of its council in London in July with maritime security on the agenda. Arsenio Dominguez, the organisation’s secretary-general, pointed at that session to continued instability around the Strait of Hormuz and to piracy off Somalia.
Piracy off the Somali coast fell sharply after 2012, following the deployment of international naval patrols and the wider use of armed guards aboard merchant ships. Reported attacks have risen again since 2023.
Ransom, rather than cargo, has long been the objective of Somali pirate groups, which have held crews for periods running to months.
UKMTO advised masters transiting the Gulf of Aden and the Somali basin to review their vessel hardening measures and to maintain a lookout for small craft operating at distance from the coast.
UKMTO, which is run by the Royal Navy, acts as the point of contact between merchant shipping and military forces in the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea. It issues advisories to vessels and collates incident reports from masters at sea.
In July, the secretary-general of the International Maritime Organization called for the release of 44 seafarers then being held by pirates in Somali waters.
The Sibu 1 carries International Maritime Organization number 9204776.
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