INS Trikand thwarts piracy bid on MV Golden Arsenal in Gulf of Aden

INS Trikand thwarts piracy attempt on the bulk carrier MV Golden Arsenal in the Gulf of Aden, the Indian Navy said, after the stealth frigate responded to a distress report and put a boarding team aboard the ship to search and secure it. The vessel was carrying 21 crew, one of them an Indian national, and had come under attack on 1 July, its crew locked inside the citadel and reporting the danger from behind its door.

All 21 were reported safe.

MV Golden Arsenal, a St Vincent and the Grenadines flagged bulk carrier, was transiting from Aden in Yemen when it reported the attempted attack roughly 300 nautical miles east northeast of Djibouti. The alert reached the Navy through the Gurugram based Information Fusion Centre for the Indian Ocean Region, the hub that tracks merchant traffic and distress calls across the wider ocean. INS Trikand, already mission deployed in the area, was directed to intercept and close the merchant vessel.

What happened aboard MV Golden Arsenal

The attackers reached the ship. By the Navy's account they caused damage to the bridge superstructure and the compartments around it before the attempt broke down. The crew, following the drill written for exactly this threat, had already sealed themselves inside the citadel and stayed put, reporting the attack from behind its hardened door and waiting out the danger rather than confronting the boarders.

On the morning of 2 July a boarding team from INS Trikand embarked the merchant vessel to sanitise it and take stock. The search turned up no suspicious personnel anywhere on board. Only then did the crew step out of the citadel, and together with the naval party they began checking the state of the ship.

The citadel and why it holds

The citadel is a hardened compartment built with its own communications and, where possible, control of the ship's steering and engines. A crew that reaches it in time can lock itself away, keep talking to the outside world and deny attackers command of the vessel while help closes in. It is standard now on ships crossing high risk waters, and crews drill for the dash to it. On MV Golden Arsenal it did its job.

INS Trikand thwarts piracy with air cover overhead

INS Trikand thwarts piracy of this sort more surely when it is not working alone, and this response was no exception. A Navy P-8I maritime patrol aircraft was launched to fly surveillance and reconnaissance over the area, widening the picture the responders held of the waters around the stricken ship and watching for any fresh threat. The aircraft ranges far beyond the horizon of a single frigate, and its presence over an incident like this one turns a point response into an area one.

That layering, a warship on the surface and long range eyes above it, is how the force now runs these interceptions. Speed still decides the outcome. A skiff moves fast and vanishes into the shipping lanes, so a frigate already on station is worth far more than one steaming up from a distant port, and the value is counted in the minutes it takes to reach a ship under attack.

A corridor the Navy has not left since 2008

This stretch of water is familiar ground. The Indian Navy has held a continuous anti-piracy presence in the Gulf of Aden and the wider Western Indian Ocean since 2008, and it keeps at least one warship mission deployed in the corridor at all times. Somali piracy fell away sharply after its peak early in the last decade, yet it never fully died, and attempts have crept back alongside the instability spilling out of the Red Sea and the approaches to the Bab el Mandeb.

For India the stakes sit close to home. A large share of the country's trade and energy imports crosses this water, and Indian nationals crew ships of every flag that pass through it. The Navy has folded this operation into its wider maritime security effort, which keeps warships forward deployed across the Arabian Sea and the Gulf region and draws on lessons from earlier deployments and the coast guard's work nearer the coast. Readers following the service will recall the Indian Coast Guard rescue off the Mangaluru coast, the recent Eastern Fleet visit to Thailand, and tall ship INS Sudarshini's Atlantic passage.

Threat neutralised, voyage resumed

With the vessel sanitised and the immediate threat gone, INS Trikand's anti-piracy operation on MV Golden Arsenal was declared closed. The bulk carrier has since resumed her onward passage. The Navy said it remains committed to safeguarding merchant shipping, countering piracy and protecting the safety of seafarers in the region whatever flag they sail under.