There was no word on what Iran would do with the pirates.
The capture was announced Monday by Navy Lt. Cmdr. Ahmad Asheqi, the commander of the Chabahar Naval Base.
He said six Somali pirates last month attacked an Iranian fishing boat in the Indian Ocean, capturing the craft and the crew. He did not say how many fishermen were aboard the boat when it was seized.
The pirates then set sail for Somalia with their captives. Somewhere along the way, the fishermen turned on their captors and made them captives. Then the Iranians turned the boat around and sailed for Chabahar.
Asheqi said the pirates were armed with five Kalashnikov rifles, two launchers for rocket-powered grenades (RPGs) and six RPGs.
Many countries are now trying to captured Somalia pirates and imprisoning them, though many have just been freed at sea after being disarmed. There has been no word on what the Islamic Republic will do with the six Somalis.
The Iranian Navy claims to have intervened to stop more than a dozen hijackings of Iranian ships at sea. But it has never reported taking any pirates captive.
The commander of the Iran Navy, Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, was quoted last week as saying the Navy had expanded the area in which it operates anti-piracy patrols five-fold.
PressTV quoted Sayyari as saying that until now the ant-piracy patrols operated over 400 square kilometers, but were now operating in an area of 2,000 square kilometers. But both of those areas are extremely small. The area of 400 square kilometers is only half the size of New York City. The Gulf of Aden, which is only part of the area in which Somali pirates operate, measures 530,000 square kilometers, so, by the figure cited, the Navy is now operating in less than 1 percent of the area of the Gulf of Aden.
Sayyari also announced that the submarine force the Navy dispatched to the Red Sea in May has returned to Iran after 67 days at sea, the furthest deployment of any Iranian sub. Iranian officials had previously spoken of “submarines” (plural) going to the Red Sea. But the announcement of the return named only the Yunes as having been away. The Yunes was the third of three Kilo-class subs that Iran bought from Russia in the 1990s.
