[Al Arabiya Latest] Gunmen robbed the crews of four ships anchored off Iraq's southern oil hub Basra last week in Iraqi regional waters patrolled by the U.S. Navy, a Navy official said on Sunday.
Two men armed with AK-47 rifles boarded the American ship Sagamore in the vicinity of an Iraqi oil terminal in the northern Persian Gulf at 4 a.m. on Aug. 8, taking computers, cell phones and money from crew members before fleeing the vessel after about 40 minutes on board, according to Lt. John Fage, a spokesman for the Navy's Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.
He said three other ships -- the Antigua-flagged Armenia, the North Korean Crystal Meth Wave and the Syrian Sana Star -- were also robbed under similar circumstances during a two-hour period starting about 2 a.m. the same day. Other information about the attackers, including their nationalities, was not known, Fage said.
The seaborne robbery occurred about 32 kilometers (20 miles) off the port of Umm Qasr in an area that is patrolled jointly by the U.S. Navy and Iraqi sailors. American vessels in the area for routine security operations, including a guided missile destroyer, responded to the attacks, Fage said.
For a moment there I thought he was going to tell us that the destroyer also had been robbed, at which point I would have said that things were truly slipping ... 
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