Police communiqué – Deaths on board Maersk Alabama |20 February 2014

Dead security guards were Americans

The two security guards found dead on board container ship Maersk Alabama on Tuesday are Americans Jeffrey Reynolds and Mark Kennedy, the Seychelles police have said.

Jeffrey Reynolds and Mark Kennedy were discovered dead on the ship moored in Port Victoria late in the afternoon of Tuesday February 18.
 
Their bodies were found in Kennedy's cabin by a colleague who had gone to check on him at around 4.30pm.

Both aged 44, Reynolds and Kennedy worked for Trident Security Firm USA. They were part of a ship crew of 24 members who arrived in Port Victoria on Sunday February 16 and were expected to leave at 9pm on Tuesday night.

A postmortem will be carried out on the two men’s bodies in order to establish the cause of their sudden deaths, while the police continue investigating the possible circumstances which could have led to these incidents.

The case was reported to the Seychelles police at around 5pm on Tuesday by Maersk Alabama's shipping agents Hunt Deltel.

The Maersk Alabama was twice attacked by Somali pirates in the space of seven months in 2009.

Pirates first hijacked the Maersk Alabama in April 2009 and took ship captain Richard Phillips hostage, holding him at gunpoint in a lifeboat for five days. Navy SEAL sharpshooters freed Phillips while killing three pirates in a daring nighttime attack.

The second pirate attack was in November 2009 and an on-board security team repelled the attack by using evasive maneuvers, small-arms fire and a Long Range Acoustic Device, which can beam earsplitting alarm tones.

Based on the true story of the 2009 Maersk Alabama hijacking, the film Captain Phillips, directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdi, was released last year.