Within six hours of the outbreak of hostilities, the town's telegraph office and main government buildings were under revolutionary control, and the island's only airstrip was captured at 2:18 pm. In the countryside, fighting had erupted between the Manga as the rural Arabs were called, and the Africans. The Manga were armed with their hunting rifles, and once the arms seized from the police stations reached the rebels in the countryside, the Manga were doomed. In Stone Town, the fiercest resistance was at the Malindi police station, where under the command of Police Commissioner J.M. Sullivan (a British policeman who stayed on until a local replacement could be hired), all of the rebel attacks were repulsed, not least because the insurgents tended to retreat whenever they came under fire. Sullivan only surrendered the Melindi station late in the afternoon after running out of ammunition, and marched his entire force (not one policeman had been killed or wounded) down to the Stonetown wharf to board some boats that took them out to a ship, the "Salama" to take them away from Zanzibar. Throughout Stone Town, shops and homes owned by Arabs and South Asians had been looted while numerous Arab and South Asian women were gang-raped. The Sultan, together with Prime Minister Muhammad Shamte Hamadi and members of the cabinet, fled the island on the royal yacht "Seyyid Khalifa", and the Sultan's palace and other property were seized by the revolutionary government. At least 80 people were killed and 200 injured, the majority of whom were Arabs, during the 12 hours of street fighting that followed. Sixty-one American citizens, including 16 men staffing a NASA satellite tracking station, sought sanctuary in the English Club in Zanzibar Town, and four US journalists were detained by the island's new government.