Cargo ship ‘was hijacked by pirates’

A Russian-crewed cargo ship that went missing for more than two weeks was hijacked by pirates, Russia's defense minister said Tuesday. "The hijackers boarded the Arctic Sea, threatened the crew with weapons and demanded that their orders be followed," Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov told President Dmitry Medvedev, according to the state-run RIA Novosti news agency. Russian authorities announced Tuesday that they had opened a criminal investigation on charges of "kidnapping by an organized group of people," the Prosecutor General's ...