MOGADISHU, Somalia — Pirates holding a Ukrainian ship laden with tanks and weapons claimed today they were celebrating the Muslim feast of Eid al-Fitr despite being surrounded by American warships and helicopters. They also denied a report of a shootout aboard the seized ship.

No solution to their $20 million ransom demand for the cargo ship Faina was yet in sight.

"We are happy on the ship and we are celebrating Eid," pirate spokesman Sugule Ali told The Associated Press by satellite phone. "Nothing has changed."

Andrew Mwangura of the East African Seafarers' Assistance Program said there was an unconfirmed report that three Somali pirates were killed Monday night in a dispute over whether to surrender, but he said he had not spoken to any witnesses.

But the pirate spokesman insisted that was not true.

"We didn't dispute over a single thing, let alone have a shootout," Ali told the AP.

The blue-and-white Ukrainian ship Faina has been buzzed by American helicopters since Sunday. Pirates hijacked the Faina and its cargo of 33 Soviet-designed tanks and weapons Thursday while the ship was passing through the Gulf of Aden, one of the world's busiest shipping lanes, en route to the Kenyan port of Mombasa.

HONG KONG — Anglo-Dutch food giant Unilever said today it has started recalling some of its Lipton-brand milk tea powder in Hong Kong and Macau after they were found to contain traces of an industrial chemical.The recall of four batches of Lipton's 3-in-1 milk tea powder came after the company's internal quality check found melamine in the products, Unilever Hong Kong Ltd. said in a statement.The contaminated products used Chinese-made milk powder as raw material, said marketing director Sharon Hwang for Unilever Hong Kong. She declined to reveal which Chinese brand the company had used.Last week, Unilever has also removed Lipton Green Milk Tea from the Taiwan market because the product used Chinese-made milk.Hong Kong's Center for Food Safety also called on the public to avoid drinking the contaminated products and alerted all suppliers, importers and retailers to stop selling them. The agency did not find melamine in Lipton products so far.Dozens of Chinese-made food products have been found to contain melamine, killing four babies and sickening more than 50,000 in mainland China.

HONG KONG — British candy maker Cadbury said Monday it is recalling 11 types of Chinese-made chocolates found to contain melamine, as police in northern China raided a network accused of adding the banned chemical to milk.A Cadbury spokesman said it was too early to say how much of the chemical was in the chocolates made at its Beijing plant, and another company official said the factory was responsible for only 0.5 percent of global sales and supplies Australia, Taiwan, Nauru, Hong Kong and Christmas Island."It's too early to say where the source was or the extent of it," said the spokesman, who declined to be identified because of company policy.The company said its dairy suppliers are generally cleared by government milk testing.Meanwhile, police in Hebei province arrested 22 people and seized more than 480 pounds of the chemical, used to make plastics, in the raids, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.The report said the melamine was produced in illicit plants and sold to breeding farms and purchasing stations.Authorities believe suppliers added melamine, which is rich in nitrogen, to watered-down milk to deceive quality tests for protein.Cadbury's chocolates sold in the United States are not affected by the recall, said Kirk Saville, a spokesman for Hershey's, Cadbury's sole U.S. distributor.

KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan policeman opened fire on U.S. troops inside a police station in eastern Afghanistan, killing an American soldier and wounding several other people, officials said Monday.The shooting took place in Paktia province on Sunday after American troops and Afghan police brought militant suspects to the station. An officer already at the station then opened fire, a NATO official said on condition of anonymity because the information was not supposed to be released publicly.The police officer wounded three or four American soldiers, an Afghan interpreter for the military and one of the detainees, the NATO official said.