Indian Navy warship INS Trikand successfully responded to a piracy attempt on MV Golden Arsenal, a St. Vincent and the Grenadines-flagged bulk carrier, around 300 nautical miles east-northeast of Djibouti. The crew of 21, including one Indian national, remained safe after taking shelter in the ship's citadel.
New Delhi: Indian Naval Ship Trikand, a mission-deployed stealth frigate of the Indian Navy operating in the Gulf of Aden, responded swiftly to a piracy attempt on MV Golden Arsenal, a St. Vincent and the Grenadines-flagged bulk carrier, on July 1. The ship under attack, MV Golden Arsenal, a St Vincent and the Grenadines-flagged bulk carrier, was roughly 300 nautical miles east-northeast of Djibouti and en route from Aden, Yemen, when it sent out the alert.
INS Trikand alerted
Word reached the Information Fusion Centre-Indian Ocean Region – the multinational maritime security hub India has run out of Gurugram since 2018 – which passed the alert on to INS Trikand. The frigate, already on deployment in the area, was sent to intercept.
The bulk carrier had 21 crew aboard, one of them Indian, and took damage to its bridge structure and nearby compartments in the attack. The crew locked themselves into the ship’s citadel and came through unharmed.
A boarding party from Trikand went aboard the next morning to clear the vessel. They found no one hiding aboard, and the crew was able to leave the citadel. Navy personnel then stayed on to help the crew work out how bad the damage was.
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Overhead, a P-8I maritime patrol aircraft flew reconnaissance passes to build a fuller picture of the area – one of several long-range surveillance aircraft the navy keeps for this kind of work.
Once the ship had been cleared and the threat was gone, Trikand wrapped up the operation and Golden Arsenal carried on with its voyage.
It’s the latest in a busy stretch for Indian warships patrolling the Gulf of Aden and western Indian Ocean under the navy's long-running Operation Sankalp.
MV Fareeda 5's distress call
On June 17, Trikand answered a distress call from MV Fareeda 5 and drove off a suspected pirate approach in the western Indian Ocean. Before that, on May 27, the destroyer INS Kolkata did the same for MV Mashallah 1.
The pattern fits a broader spike: piracy is picking up again off Somalia and in the Gulf of Aden, with maritime security trackers logging more than a dozen incidents since January 2026, several of them hijackings. The UK Maritime Trade Operations agency bumped its threat rating for the region up to “severe” in April.
India has kept warships on anti-piracy duty in the Gulf of Aden since 2008, watching over one of the busiest shipping lanes on the planet, the route linking Asia to Europe and the Americas through the Suez Canal.
The Maritime Anti-Piracy Act, 2022 gives the navy and other agencies the power to put captured pirates on trial in Indian courts. That law was put to use in 2024, when naval commandos freed a hijacked ship off Somalia and brought 35 suspected pirates back to Mumbai to face charges.
