State news agency Bernama, quoting Malaysia’s naval chief Admiral Abdul Aziz Jaafar, said the 7,301-dwt Orkim Harmony (built 2009) had been repainted and renamed.
“We have found the vessel and Malaysian military aircraft and Royal Australian Air Force aircraft are tailing it from the air,” Jaafar told Bernama.
The New Straits Times reported that a senior navy official who was directly involved in the search efforts said the ship was sighting by an Australian aircraft.
A spokesperson from the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) declined to confirm the news reports. The agency will hold a press briefing at 0700 GMT Thursday.
The 7,301-dwt Orkim Harmony (built 2009) lost communication with its owners last week and is believed to have been hijacked.
The tanker left Malacca last Wednesday and was due to arrive at Kuantan port early the next day, but communication was lost just before 9pm local time.
However, Malaysian authorities were not notified about its disappearance until first thing Saturday morning.
The ship was reportedly carrying 5,879t of RON95 fuel worth MYR 21m ($5.5m) which belongs to state-owned oil company Petronas.
Vice Admiral Ahmad Puzi, the MMEA’s deputy director general of the operations, told reporters on Monday that it would be difficult for the pirates to siphon off the gasoline from the Harmony as it was highly flammable and that they were likely looking for the proper facilities to do a ship-to-ship transfer.
The ship also had a crew of 22 people made up of Indonesians, Malaysians and Myanmar nationals.
It was the second Orkim Ship Management-controlled vessel to have been attacked by pirates in the space of eight days.
The 7,119-dwt Orkim Victory (built 2009) was hijacked and had its cargo of fuel siphoned off and stolen in the early hours of 4 June 2015.
