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AFP, MOGADISHU - Somali pirates on Thursday seized a Greek ship and a Hong Kong-flagged vessel in the latest in a string of attacks that have prompted calls for international action, officials said. Pirates armed with rockets seized the freighter Centauri with a crew of 25 Filipinos some 200 miles south of Mogadishu on Thursday.
"The pirates attacked and boarded the ship, she was en route to Kenya with a crew of 25 on board," said Noel Choong, head of the International Maritime Bureau's (IMB) Piracy Reporting Centre in Kuala Lumpur.
He said pirates are now targeting ships on the eastern side of Somalia.
Hijackers also took the Hong Kong-flagged Great Creation on Wednesday with its 25 crew -- 24 Chinese and one Sri Lankan.
The ship was on its way to the Indian Port of Pipavav from Tunisia, said Andrew Mwangura who runs the Kenya chapter of the Seafarers Assistance programme.
Mwangura told AFP the ship was being taken to Eyl, a pirate lair in Somalia's northern breakaway state of Puntland.
A representative of the firm that owns Centauri said "all the crew are fine" but declined to give more details.
According to the IMB, 55 ships have been attacked off Somalia since January and 11 were still being held for ransom when news of the Great Creation's capture was reported.
This week, French commandos freed a couple who held hostage on their yacht in the region and French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for an international offensive against piracy.
Last year, the pirates had been operating on Somalia's east coast, but then shifted to the north, in the Gulf of Aden, before again recently switching back to the Indian Ocean.
Somalia's long coastline is infested with pirates, making the Gulf of Aden and neighbouring areas in the Indian Ocean among the most dangerous waters in the world.
In recent months, a Djibouti-based multinational taskforce has been patrolling the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, where a pirate mothership is believed to be operating.
Mwangura said the latest attack was evidence that pirates could play cat and mouse with foreign navies. "They are changing locations due to the heavy concentration of navy ships" near the Gulf of Aden, he told AFP.
Operating from wooden boats that are difficult to detect on radar, the heavily-armed former coast guards turned pirates flit along with ease.
"At times when the sea is rough, they are camouflaged by the waves," Simon Tousignant, the second-lieutenant of Ville de Quebec, a Canadian frigate escorting food aid to Somalia, told AFP on board the ship.
The sea bandits, whose numbers Mwangura says have risen to about 1,000 elude capture due to their rapid and unpredictable attacks.
They take advantage of maritime regulations restricting military vessels sailing on the dangerous waters from launching attacks and an their own strong communication network, he added.
Once aboard, an operation that takes about 20 minutes, the hijackers are almost untouchable with hostages under their command.
"They've got at least two mother ships at sea and they launch speed boats from these two cargos (vessels) to hijack other ships," Mwangura explained.
The Canadian frigate has been escorting UN relief food from the Kenyan port of Mombasa to the war-riven Somali capital of Mogadishu since Tuesday.
With rampant piracy and rising insecurity in the Horn of Africa nation, sea transport is the last lifeline of some 3.2 million Somalis in need of food aid.
Somalia has been without an effective central authority since the 1991 ouster of former president Mohamed Siad Barre set off a deadly power struggle.
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