The ship is owned by Vela International, a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabia-based oil giant Saudi Aramco. At 1,080 feet, it is the largest ship known to have been seized by pirates. Its 25-member crew is made up of personnel from Britain, Poland, Croatia, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia. The supertanker, about the same length as an American Nimitz class aircraft carrier, is fully loaded with two million barrels of oil valued at around $100 million. In a statement on Wednesday, Cmdr. Nirad Kumar Sinha, a spokesman for the Indian Navy, said an Indian warship, the INS Tabar, encountered a flotilla of three pirate vessels some 320 miles south west of the Omani coast in the Gulf of Aden in a separate incident on Tuesday evening.