Copters, warship beat back pirates

An international anti-piracy force thwarted the attempted takeover of a Chinese cargo ship off the Somali coast on Wednesday, sending in attack helicopters that fired on the bandits and forced them to abandon the ship they had boarded.

In another blow to the region’s thriving piracy trade, the Indian navy handed over 23 pirates it caught at sea to authorities in Yemen.

In Wednesday’s assault, nine pirates armed with guns overtook the Chinese ship with speedboats and boarded the vessel, said Noel Choong, who heads the International Maritime Bureau’s piracy reporting center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

He said the 30-member crew sent a distress message to the bureau as it saw the pirates approaching, then barricaded themselves inside their living quarters. Choong said the bureau quickly alerted the international naval force, which dispatched two helicopters and a warship.

“Two helicopters arrived at the scene first and helped deter the hijacking. They fired at the pirates, forcing them to flee the ship,” he said. There were no injuries during the five-hour ordeal.

Mogadishu, Somalia

U.S.-backed leader faces impeachment

Somalia’s parliament voted Wednesday to begin impeachment proceedings against President Abdullahi Yusuf, another sign that his U.S.- backed government is unraveling.

“This is the end of the government. This is it,” said Mohamed Amin, a member of an opposition coalition that now has a majority in parliament.

Yusuf’s government began disintegrating almost from the start two years ago, when it was installed with the might of the Ethiopian army and help from the United States.

At the time, the United States and Ethiopia viewed Yusuf – a warlord known as a tough and wily survivor – as a viable alternative to an Islamist movement that had taken over the capital of Mogadishu and that they accused of having links to al-Qaida.

But Yusuf quickly proved to be a brutal leader devoted to the interests of his own clan. His forces killed and kidnapped political opponents, among the human rights abuses that other parties to the conflict also carried out.

Yusuf and his Ethiopian backers have faced a relentless insurgency composed of clan militias and, increasingly, a radical Islamist faction known as al-Shabab. The group, which the United States has designated a terrorist organization, has in recent months advanced on cities and towns across a swath of southern Somalia and much of Mogadishu.

Now the president is losing what tenuous political support he had.