Hunt of the Sea Wolves

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Turkey’s military says navy commandos aboard a frigate have captured seven pirates in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia’s coast.

The military says the commandos aboard the frigate, part of a NATO force patrolling the seas, raided the skiff Friday upon a request to block it before it could attack a ship. The military did not provide details on what ship the pirates allegedly planned to attack.

It says a navy helicopter aboard the frigate also took part in the operation.

Turkish navy commandos had captured five other pirates in a similar operation in the Gulf of Aden a week ago.

Swedish Radio

A ship was hijacked in Swedish waters early Friday morning last week, news wire TT reports. The boat was sailing between the islands of Öland and Gotland when the hijacking occurred.

Arriving in a boat with “police” painted on the side, a group of masked men searched the Malta-registered timber boat after tying up the crew, which was Russian.

The Swedish police only got word of the hijacking when the Russian Foreign Ministry called the Swedish police to ask why they acted in that fashion. But the Swedish police had never boarded the boat.

Ingemar Isaksson, who is heading the police investigation, said on Thursday that the hijackers spent more than 12 hours on the ship. Though it’s not completely clear what the English-speaking hijackers were after, the police suspect they were looking for drugs.

“This is the first time that I’ve heard about something like this happening in Swedish waters,” Ingemar Isaksson told TT.

Swedish police started investigating the case on Wednesday, but they have still haven’t come into contact with the ship, which apparently continued its normal route after the attack.

AFP

Pirates holding a Turkish bulk carrier off Somalia have shot and wounded one of the sailors, a Turkish newspaper quoted relatives as saying Friday.

The mother of one of the 23 crew said her son told them about the incident in a brief telephone conversation earlier this week.

“My son was weeping and asking us to save them… He said that they had run out of food… and that one (sailor) had been shot and wounded,” the Radikal daily quoted Gulperi Sari as saying.

Read story at AFP

Strategy Page

Intelligence efforts have revealed attempts by Abu Sayyaf to get emergency financial aid from Islamic charities and radical groups in the Middle East. Yasser Igasan, the current Abu Sayyaf leader, was schooled as a cleric in Saudi Arabia, and has many contacts that can put him in touch with other Islamic radical groups that might help out. The military expects to wipe out Abu Sayyaf by the end of the year. This is a possibility that the Abu Sayyaf apparently takes seriously, as they are very depleted from over a year of being pursued by several elite units (Scout Rangers and Marines), assisted by American Special Forces and electronic intelligence specialists.

Read entire story at Strategy Page

Maritime Global Net

The European Union says its plans to train Somali security forces to tackle the pirates operating along the country’s coast. The BBC reports that the EU will send a planning team to the region next month. Training is to take place in neighbouring Djibouti, which has French and US military bases.

The move fits in with calls from Somalia’s Transitional Government that training its forces is the best way to defeat the pirates. It has already started to form a coastguard though Anderimar Shipping News understands that it is currently far from being an effective, deployable force. Added to this the Transitional Government, supported by many Western governments but opposed by Islamic militants, has only tenuous control over many parts of the country and even of areas of the capital Mogadishu.

The BBC says EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana announced the training plan following a meeting of the EU’s 27 foreign ministers and said the EU was concentrating on three issues: the training itself, how to pay the salaries of the new security force and how to cooperate with the African Union peacekeeping mission already in Somalia.

Forbes

DynCorp International, the Falls Church, Va., provider of mission critical services to the U.S. military, got good news Thursday from Houston rival KBR, which said it would not be protesting the recent loss of work supporting American troops in Afghanistan to DynCorp and Fluor Group.

“We recently met with the customer for a debrief of the selection criteria and the decision metrics for the awards,” said KBR ( KBR - news - people ) chief William Utt on KBR’s Thursday conference call. “After the debrief we decided KBR will not protest the outcome of the awards.”

Read entire story at Forbes

Bloomberg

Somali pirates holding a German container ship for ransom increased their demand to $4 million from $3 million after the raiders disagreed among themselves on how to divide the money, a member of the gang said.

The German-flagged Hansa Stavanger has been held since early April, when it was seized between the Seychelles and Kenya.

“We had previously agreed $3 million with the owners but due to some circumstances, mainly because we are so many and we have had the ship approximately four months, we decided to ask them to add an additional $1 million,” Ahmed Hassan, a pirate whose gang hijacked the ship, said in a phone interview today. “It was intended to release the ship after the ransom but now it seems that it will take extra time because the owners haven’t yet answered our offer to increase the money to $4 million.”

Read entire story at Bloomberg

Voice News

The freighter captain, the cop, the guy from the private security firm, the Swiss Army major, and the reporter never saw the pirates coming. They popped up seemingly out of nowhere, and with one “Getupagainstthewall!” the two buccaneers had taken control of the bridge simulator. In the commotion, the captain managed to disable the rudder, which was good news for the reporter, who didn’t know how to pretend to steer the ship anyway, even with a handgun in his face.

The hostage training, put on by two representatives of SAFE Solutions, a security consulting firm that employs ex-military types, was the final installment of a two-day Piracy Countermeasures Seminar hosted in June by the Global Maritime and Transportation School (GMATS) at the United States Merchant Marine Academy (USMMA), just across the Queens border in Kings Point. Over those two days, officials from government agencies, the NYPD, the mariners union, and other organizations briefed shipping industry representatives, security consultants, and members of the military on the latest news involving piracy off the coast of Somalia.

Such continuing education seminars are one way that New York’s two maritime schools—the USMMA and SUNY Maritime, across the sound in Throgs Neck—are addressing the piracy epidemic that has exploded off the Horn of Africa in the last two years. The other is in the classroom, where students learn preventive measures to thwart pirates boarding the ship if outrunning them fails, and even ways to deter them using non-lethal means. Students are also at the center of a debate about who should defend crew and cargo from a pirate attack, and how. Should shipping companies hire armed professionals? Should the military step in? Should the mariners themselves be armed?

Read entire story at Village Voice News

Reuters

Somali pirates received a $1.8 million ransom for the release of a German-owned vessel and its 11-member crew, pirate sources and officials said at the weekend.

The 146-metre MV Victoria, an Antigua and Barbuda-flagged cargo vessel, was hijacked in the Gulf of Aden on May 5 while on its way to the port of Jeddah.

Last week Somali pirates abandoned a dhow and its 14 member Indian crew after using the hijacked ship to attack an oil tanker, a European Union anti-piracy force said. Pirates had seized the Nefya on July 11 and used it to launch a failed attack two days later on the 265,000-tonne, Liberian-flagged oil tanker “A Elephant”.

Here are details of some ships believed to be under pirate control and some facts about the increase in piracy:

Read entire story at Reuters

New American

In an economy where there are no guarantees, why not invest in cargo-ship hijacking? In a recent interview with Scott Carney from Wired, a Somali pirate discloses information about the recent ship hijackings around the horn of Africa and the motivation behind the pirate attacks.

When asked what his job was before ship-hijacking or what forced him into a life of crime on the high seas, the pirate defended his actions noting that Somalians once earned a living through fishing, but that that was no longer feasible. Instead, he claimed, “We became watchmen of our coasts and took up our duty to protect the country. Don’t call us pirates. We are protectors.”

The “protector” interviewed by Wired admitted that they attack ships everyday but pointed out that only some are profitable. He went on to say that ships from third-world countries are rarely profitable and the jackpot is with the western ships carrying oil, weapons, and other valuable cargo.

Read entire story at the New American