In its second successful strike within a week, Indian Navy stealth frigate INS Tabar repulsed an attack by pirates off the Somali coast and sunk their ship. According to official sources, the incident happened at around 9.45 pm Tuesday night, and there were no casualities from the Indian side.

Reports say that the Indian Navy acted definitively after a group of pirate vessels tried to encircle the Indian warship in the Gulf of Aden late Tuesday, with the motive to attack it. After a brief exchange of light fire, the warship hit the pirate vessel leading to its sinking.

Describing the incident, a Navy official said: "The pirates fired at INS Tabar, which is patrolling the waters off the Somali coast. The ship retaliated and sank the pirate vessel."

Last week, INS Tabar prevented the hijack of an Indian merchant vessel. This year has seen a spurt in the pirates' activities off the coast of Somalia, which is caught up in an Islamic insurgency and has had no functioning government since 1991. Till now, there have been nearly 90 such attacks. In the last 12 days itself, they have hijacked seven ships in the Gulf of Aden, the latest being an Iranian cargo vessel.

The Indian warship was dispatched to the Gulf of Aden in October after this recent spike in piracy and hijackings. INS Tabar, the third of the Talwar-class frigates of the Indian Navy, is the first vessel in this class to be armed with supersonic BrahMos (PJ-10) Anti-ship cruise missiles.