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ABC's lead Exclusive may have looked back to last week's Indian Ocean drama on the Maersk Line's Alabama but the pirate bands of Somalia have already moved on. NBC's Jim Miklaszewski and ABC's David Muir both narrated the attempted seizure 300-miles offshore of the New York based Liberty Sun, a second freighter flying the United States flag. Muir reported that the 20-man crew barricaded itself in the engine room so that when pirates boarded the ship after a rocket grenade attack there was no one to operate it. All three newscasts reenacted the Liberty Sun's escape with animated computer graphics.
CBS had Jeff Glor of its Early Show file a stake-out at Andrews AFB in Maryland awaiting the arrival of the Alabama's crew. In the meantime he ran down anti-piracy precautions. Diverting shipping around the Cape of Good Hope would be prohibitively expensive but confining merchant shipping to narrow sea lanes with naval patrols might be possible. The pirates' land bases are likely too small and scattered to be taken out by military strikes. The military solution proposed in Muir's report on ABC was to target the mother ships that tow the pirates' small speedboats out to the shipping lanes.
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