Per Yahoo, those two American evangelists and their unfortunate crew members have been killed by their Somali captors:
NAIROBI, Kenya – Four Americans taken hostage by Somali pirates off East Africa were shot and killed by their captors Tuesday, the U.S. military said, marking the first time U.S. citizens have been killed in a wave of pirate attacks plaguing the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean for years.
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U.S. naval forces who were trailing the Americans’ captured yacht with four warships quickly boarded the vessel after hearing the gunfire. They tried to provide lifesaving care to the Americans, but they died of their wounds, U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida said in a statement…
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[Vice Adm. Mark Fox, commander of U.S. naval forces for Central Command] said in a televised briefing that the violence on Tuesday started when a rocket-propelled grenade was fired from the yacht at the USS Sterett, a guided-missile destroyer 600 yards (meters) away. The RPG missed and almost immediately afterward small arms fire was heard coming from the yacht, Fox said…
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He identified the slain Americans as Jean and Scott Adam, of Marina del Rey near Los Angeles, and Phyllis Macay and Bob Riggle, of Seattle, Washington. The Quest was the home of the Adams who had been sailing around the world since December 2004 with a yacht full of Bibles.
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Pirates hijacked the Quest on Friday several hundred miles south of Oman. Fox said mariners are warned about traveling through the area because of the dangers of pirate attacks…
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Two days before the attack, a New York court had sentenced a pirate to 33 years in prison for the 2009 hijacking of the Maersk Alabama, a U.S. cargo vessel. That hijacking ended when Navy sharpshooters killed two pirates holding the ship’s captain. A pirate in Somalia told the AP last week that pirates were more likely to attack Americans because of the verdict….
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Omar Jamal, first secretary at Somalia’s mission at the U.N., sent his condolences to the families of the four Americans and called the deaths a tragic loss of life. Jamal said there is an urgent need to address the piracy problem.
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“This incident is a clear message and alarm that it’s time the world community quickly steps up to stop these pirate criminal activities. They should be treated mercilessly,” said Gen. Yusuf Ahmed Khayr, the security minister in the northern Somalia region of Puntland, a pirate haven.
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The Adams ran a Bible ministry and have been distributing Bibles to schools and churches in remote villages in areas including the Fiji Islands, Alaska, New Zealand, Central America and French Polynesia.
I realize that America is a center-right Judeo-Christian nation, and that our precious First Amendment freedoms include the freedom to yacht around pirate-infested waters evangelizing for our religion of choice. It just irks me that, if we’re gonna achieve Karl Rove’s wet dream of a 21st-century McKinley Administration, the measure of our national prestige has been reduced from a warship “protecting U.S. interests” to a couple of well-meaning retirees hoping to bring the Wurd of Gawd to the heatherns. And it’s almost too narratively neat that the commander shoved out in front of the cameras to explain this little contretemps should share a surname with our very own modern inheritor of the William Randolph Hearst tradition of yelllow journalism…
“Remember the ‘Quest’, Forget the Rest!”Post + Comments (195)