Pirates firing machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades have boarded a tanker off the coast of Somalia.

Greek shipping company Latsco Marine Management confirmed its vessel, Hellas Aphrodite, had been attacked in the early hours of Thursday.

The tanker, which was carrying fuel, was en route from India to South Africa when a “security incident” took place, the firm said.

“All 24 crew are safe and accounted for and we remain in close contact with them,” it added in a statement.

The crew members took shelter in the ship’s “citadel”, or fortified safe room, and remain there, an official from maritime security company Diaplous said.

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) agency issued an alert to warn ships in the area.

It located the vessel 560 nautical miles southeast of Eyl, Somalia, in the Indian Ocean. Eyl became famous in the mid-2000s as the centre of a string of piracy attacks.

“The Master of a vessel has reported being approached by one small craft on its stern. The small craft fired small arms and RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] towards the vessel,” UKMTO said in a statement.

EU forces move in on tanker

The European Union’s Operation Atalanta, a counter-piracy mission around the Horn of Africa, said one of its assets was “close to the incident” and “ready to take the appropriate actions”.

That EU force has responded to other recent pirate attacks in the area and had issued a recent alert that a pirate group was operating off Somalia and assaults were “almost certain” to happen.

Private security firm Ambrey has claimed that Somali pirates were operating from an Iranian fishing boat they had seized and had opened fire on the tanker.

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Pirate gangs resume attacks

Thursday’s attack comes after another vessel, the Cayman Islands-flagged Stolt Sagaland, found itself targeted in a suspected pirate attack that included both its armed security force and the attackers shooting at each other, the EU force said.

The vessel’s operator Stolt-Nielsen confirmed there was an attempted attack, early on 3 November, which was unsuccessful.

Somali pirate gangs have been relatively inactive in recent years. In May 2024, suspected pirates boarded the Liberian-flagged vessel Basilisk. EU naval forces later rescued the 17 crew members.

Meanwhile, the last hijacking took place in December 2023, when the Maltese-flagged Ruen was taken by assailants to the Somali coast before Indian naval forces freed the crew and arrested the attackers.

Hellas Aphrodite was en route from Sikka, India, to Durban, South Africa.

The Malta-flagged tanker is described as an oil/chemical tanker, 183m long and 32m wide, which was built in 2016, according to vesselfinder.com.

This year will likely be the second or third warmest ever on record globally, as an “unprecedented streak” of high temperatures persists, UN scientists have warned.

It comes as climate talks between world leaders get under way in Brazil.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Prince William addressed other nations in the Amazonian city of Belem, including Brazil‘s president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and officials from Jamaica, which is still reeling from the devastating Hurricane Melissa.

Global average surface temperatures in January to August 2025 were 1.42C above pre-industrial times, before humans started burning fossil fuels at scale, the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation has said.

The level is closing in on the target set in the landmark Paris Agreement, struck at COP21 in 2015, which aimed to limit global warming to “well below” 2C and ideally 1.5C.

That means just 10 years later, it is already looking “virtually impossible” to stick to the Paris goal without at least temporarily overshooting it, the WMO said.

Under this heat, the UK experienced its hottest summer on record, two million people in Pakistan were evacuated from deadly floods and parts of the Amazon rainforest are so dry that once rare wildfires now spread easily.

Hilde Heine, president of the coral atoll country of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, said the “widespread mortality of coral reefs [is] now seemingly inevitable” and the Amazon is “likely not far behind in suffering a similar fate”.

WMO chief Celeste Saulo stressed it would be “still entirely possible and essential” to bring temperatures down to the 1.5C goal again.

That 1.5C limit is “not just a figure” but a “lifeline for Pacific communities and climate-vulnerable nations” grappling with rising and warming seas, said Shiva Gounden, head of Pacific at Greenpeace Australia Pacific.

“The legal, moral, and political responsibility for climate action has never been stronger, and the ambition leaders take to Belem will define its success.”

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Who’s staying away?

The leaders are in town over the course of two days, before the COP30 climate summit begins on Monday.

But only about 60 are due to attend, compared with more than double the number in some previous years.

The heads of the world’s three largest drivers of climate change, China, the US and India, are all staying at home.

Although many missing leaders will still send officials to the negotiations, diplomats here in Belem are worried that governments are distracted by cost-of-living woes and boosting defence.

They also fear US President Donald Trump will seek to water down any deals from afar by threatening countries that agree to anything too ambitious.

Leaders ‘denying reality’

Mariana Menezes, a Brazilian mother caught up in the devastating floods in Rio Grande do Sul last year, said: “We see world leaders denying reality and making plans to expand fossil fuels.

“These people, who once enjoyed full lives with unforgettable summers and long walks outdoors in their youth, are condemning future generations to lives of pollution and disasters.”

The WMO’s annual State of the Climate reports found that the past 11 years – from the Paris Agreement year of 2015 to 2025 – have each been in the top 11 warmest on record.

And the past three years have been the three warmest years in the record, stretching back 176 years.

In his speech, Sir Keir admitted that the “consensus is gone” on climate change – that cross-party unity on the science has splintered at home and globally.

He made an economic case for net zero, saying the green transition would create jobs and lower household bills.

But despite attacks on climate policies from the Conservatives and Reform, Britons are still concerned about and believe in climate change, and are still buying in to green technology like electric vehicles and heat pumps, Sky News has found.