Police have set up round-the-clock checkpoints around Zamboanga City following the killing of an Abu Sayyaf Group leader in Sulu province over the weekend.

Senior Superintendent Edwin de Ocampo, acting city police director, said the checkpoints will be random to and all parts of the city will be covered by the heightened security set up.

The Philippine National Police on Sunday placed all its units in Mindanao on full alert in anticipation of retaliation by the bandit group.

Abu Sayyaf leader Abdul Gafur Jumdail and his two followers were killed by policemen in an encounter in Sulu past midnight Sunday.

Read entire story at ABS CBN

Climate change may have delivered a solution to the risk faced by ships and crew passing through the waters of Gulf of Aden. A cargo ship bearing Hong Kong flag carrying 41,000 tons of iron ore will become part of maritime history as it sails from Norway to China through Russia’s arctic passage instead of the pirate-infested Somalian waters.

Although Nordic Barents is not the first ship to pass through the Arctic wasteland, it becomes the first foreign-registered vessel allowed by Russia to make a voyage between two non-Russian ports. The ship’s owner aims to prove that the route would become a viable alternative to the longer southern route from Europe to Asia. Nordic Barents is scheduled to leave the small Norwegian port of Kirkenes and head towards the Chinese port of Dalian. If the trip proves successful, the route enters one more step in competing against the Suez Canal sea route.

The first ship to do so was Russian-owned Baltica, which transported 70,000 tons of gas condensate from Murmansk, Russia to Ningbo, China only last week. The successful voyage marks a successful commercial conquest over the famed Northeast Passage. At the most dangerous stretch of the journey – the Vilkitsky Strait – sailors onboard the Baltica threw flowers into the water in memory of all the men who have died in pursuit of a quicker trade route in the past. For centuries, explorers and cargo shop owners have been looking for that elusive northern route between Europe and Asia. 

Read entire story at Asian Correspondent

Philippine police said yesterday they had captured two members of the Al Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf group wanted for high-profile kidnappings and a deadly ambush that killed 14 soldiers.

Jamiri Hashi and Adjik Halik were caught on Wednesday in Zamboanga, a port city in the restive southern Mindanao region where the militants operate, regional police commander Chief Superintendent Angelo Sunglao said.

The government had offered a 13,000 dollar bounty for the capture of Jamiri, who is among those sought for the ambush of 14 marines by Abu Sayyaf on the nearby island of Basilan in July 2007. The militant group mutilated and beheaded the soldiers.

“Jamiri is facing a string of charges for multiple murder,” Sunglao said.Halik was wanted for taking part in the kidnapping of 21 mostly European hostages in an Abu Sayyaf cross-border raid into a dive resort off Sabah in 2001.

All of the hostages were later freed in batches after several months following alleged ransom payments.

Both men are scheduled to be flown to a jail in Manila, where they will be tried, Sunglao said.The Abu Sayyaf is a small gang of self-styled Islamic militants blamed for the country’s worst terrorist attacks, including the bombing of a passenger ferry that killed more than 100 people in Manila Bay in 2004.

Zamboanga del Sur fishermen are urging the authorities to solve the problem of pirate attacks in Illana Bay.

The fishermen are also asking the Fishery Law Enforcement Team of the Illana Bay Alliance in Western Mindanao to reactivate a Navy sub-station in Pagadian City.

Ramon Abella, a representative of the fishermen, told reporters Thursday the pirate attacks had increased to an alarming rate lately and that the fishermen had formally asked the authorities, particularly the Fishery law Enforcement Team, to take action.Abella said since March, 15 fishermen had died from pirate attacks on Illana Bay, particularly in the areas near Dinas town.Illana is a major fishing area off Pagadian City and the towns of Tukuran, Tabina, Labangan, Dumalinao, San Pablo, Dinas and Diamataling.

The Philippine Coast Guard has confirmed the fatality figure.Read entire story at Inquirer 

Three policemen were hurt in a clash with suspected members of the Abu Sayyaf Group in Indanan, Sulu Monday afternoon, a police report revealed Wednesday.

Reports reaching Camp Crame said the members of the Sulu police, including provincial chief Senior Superintendent Joseph Ramac, shot it out with an undetermined number of the terror group in Barangay (village) Ajid at around 3 p.m. Monday.  

They were on the way back to their police camp.Wounded in the attack were members of the elite Special Action Force unit identified only as Police Officer 2 De Vera, and PO1s Ratilla and Medinella.

The report said it was unclear if there were casualties among the Abu Sayyaf.The wounded policemen have been rushed to the Sulu General Hospital.The police had just come from visiting the villages of Likbah and Paiksan, whose residents were harassed by armed men last August 15.

The Norfolk-based USS San Jacinto is on an anti-piracy mission in the Gulf of Aden, which is a corridor much of the world’s trade.

CTF-151, a coalition anti-piracy effort, is working to fend off pirate attacks in an area where hundreds of attacks are carried out each year.

Capt. John Cordle, commanding officer, USS San Jacinto, tracked down a boat of suspected pirates believed to have tried to board a merchant ship.

“As soon as they saw us, they started chucking their weapons overboard, weapons and paraphenalia. 20-30 minutes into the chase, we got permission for warning shots. About the eight time they did that, he just stopped and threw his hands up,” he said.

Gitte Lillelund Bech, the Danish minister of defence, has revealed that Danish soldiers could soon be heading to the African east and west coasts to help prevent the development of more piracy, as has been an issue in Somalia.

The navy’s warships have over the past two years been involved in the hunt for Somali pirates off the coast of Africa, but Bech at the weekend said that this is not a long term solution, and that there needs to be taken steps to prevent piracy in other countries.

 She wants Danish soldiers in Africa to set up coast guards, and to help African nations implement fishing controls, as it is believed that most Somali pirates were originally fishermen who turned to piracy after other nations emptied the Somali waters of fish.

Gunmen robbed four commercial ships anchored near the southern oil hub of Basra in a rare attack off the Iraqi coast, the U.S. Navy said Sunday.

Two men armed with AK-47 rifles boarded the American ship Sagamore in the vicinity of an Iraqi oil terminal in the northern Persian Gulf at 4 a.m. on Aug. 8, taking computers, cell phones and money from crew members before fleeing the vessel after about 40 minutes on board, according to Lt. John Fage, a spokesman for the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.

He said three other ships — the Antigua-flagged Armenia, the North Korean Crystal Wave and the Syrian Sana Star — were also robbed under similar circumstances during a two-hour period starting about 2 a.m. the same day.

Fage said he had no other information about the attackers or their nationalities.

Salah Aboud, head of the country’s ports agency, said two Iraqis were arrested after Iraqi naval forces found a boat holding some of the stolen materials during a search of a nearby area.

The seaborne robbery occurred about 20 miles (32 kilometers) off the port of Umm Qasr in an area patrolled jointly by the U.S. Navy and Iraqi sailors. American vessels in the area for routine security operations, including a guided missile destroyer, responded to the attacks, Fage said.

The attack reflects concerns about an increase in crime in Iraq even as political violence ebbs, but Fage played down concerns it signaled a new threat to commercial traffic in the Gulf.

On July 28, a Japanese oil tanker elsewhere in the Gulf was damaged and one crew member was injured in what the United Arab Emirates said was a suicide bombing.