CAIRO, Jan 1: Somali pirates seized an Egyptian merchant ship off the Somali coast on Thursday and were taking it to Somalia with the crew of 28 Egyptians as hostages, a foreign ministry official said.

Ahmed Rizk, an assistant foreign minister, told reporters that a ship called Blue Star had been sailing east with a cargo of 6,000 tonnes of urea. “We were told that the abductors were about 15 people, some of them armed with non-light weapons,” he said.

The Egyptian government said in December it was ready to take part in an international naval force to tackle piracy off the coast of Somalia.

Several major shipping companies have decided to divert ships from the Suez Canal route to the Cape of Good Hope route around Africa, cutting into Egypt’s revenue from the canal, which is a major hard currency earner for the Arab country.

Warships from Britain, India, Greece, Italy, Russia, Turkey and the United States are already patrolling the seas where the pirates operate, so far with limited success. Rizk said Egyptian authorities were working to establish “the necessary contacts” to release the ship.

Somali pirates captured an Egyptian ship in September but released it after 20 days of negotiations with Egyptian intelligence.—Reuters