The US Navy has freed two more ships from pirates off the Somali coast today. Negotiations are underway to free three more ships.
NAIROBI, Kenya – Somali pirates left two boats they had hijacked in the waters off the Horn of Africa, and the newly liberated vessels — and their crew of 24 — were under U.S. Navy escort on Sunday, the American military said.
A U.S. Navy ship and helicopter were guiding the Tanzanian-flagged boats Mavuno 1 and 2 further out to sea, where naval personnel will later board the vessels and treat crew members, said Cmdr. Lydia Robertson of the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. The Navy is in radio contact with pirates aboard three other ships in the region, encouraging them also to leave those ships and sail back to Somalia, she told The Associated Press.
"We're very happy with this development and hope it happens with the other ships off the coast," Robertson said. "We're very happy for the crew and their families."
Robertson said the pirates boarded skiffs after they left the hijacked ships, and headed back to Somalia. No shots were fired during the incident, she said. She gave no more details.
The U.S. has now intervened four times in one week to help ships hijacked by Somali pirates. Sailors boarded a North Korean ship to give medical assistance to crew members who overpowered their hijackers, and a Naval vessel fired on pirate skiffs tied to a Japanese-owned ship.
Robertson said that ship was still under control of pirates, although the U.S. Navy was still working to free that ship from pirates. There were no details on the other two seized ships. Hijackings in the vast stretch of water frequently go unreported.
I linked this article about the resurgence of piracy from the Smithsonian Magazine once before. Every story in the news lately mentions that the problem is growing of Somalia. That is a fact, but piracy is actually on the rise all over the world.
Today's pirates range from villainous seaside villagers to members of international crime syndicates. They ply their trade around the globe, from Iraq to Somalia to Nigeria, from the Strait of Malacca to the territorial waters off South America. No vessel seems safe, be it a supertanker or a private yacht. In November 2005, pirates in two speedboats tried to attack the cruise liner Seabourn Spirit off Somalia. The liner's captain, Sven Erik Pedersen, outran them while driving them off with a Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD—a sonic weapon the United States military developed after the USS Cole was attacked by Al Qaeda terrorists in Yemen in 2000.
If you enter an anonymous office 35 floors above Kuala Lumpur's lush tropical streets and pass through a secured door, you will come to a small room dominated by maps of the world taped onto two of the walls. This is the IMB's Piracy Reporting Centre, which operates round-the-clock. When pirates attack anywhere in the world, this office almost always receives the first report of it and radios out the first alert. Tens of thousands of vessels depend on the IMB's information.
Red pins mark the latest attacks. On the day I visited, the pins looked like a rash covering much of the world. Another wall was covered with thank-you plaques from the admirals of many nations, including the United States. Noel Choong, who ushered me through this command center, spent more than ten years on oceangoing ships as a mariner. Now, in a dark suit, the soft-spoken Choong looked more like a corporate middle manager than a supersleuth of the seas.
The media is finally paying at least a little attention to this, but their focus is still pretty narrow.
