NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The violent attack on a cruise liner off Somalia's coast shows pirates from the anarchic country on the Horn of Africa are becoming bolder and more ambitious in their efforts to hijack ships for ransom and loot, a maritime official warned Sunday.
Judging by the location of Saturday's attack, the pirates were likely from the same group that hijacked a U.N.-chartered aid ship in June and held its crew and food cargo hostage for 100 days, said Andrew Mwangura, head of the Kenyan chapter of the Seafarers Assistance Program.
That gang is one of three well-organized pirate groups on the 1,880-mile coast of Somalia, which has had no effective government since opposition leaders ousted a dictatorship in 1991 and then turned on each other, leaving the nation of 7 million a patchwork of warlord fiefdoms.
Illustrating the chaos, attackers in Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, threw grenades and exploded a land mine Sunday near a convoy carrying the prime minister of a transitional government that has been trying to exert control since late last year.
The attack, which killed at least five bodyguards, was the second in six months involving explosions near Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, whose internally divided government spends much of its time in Kenya.
Even before the attack on the liner Seabourn Spirit, Gedi had urged neighboring countries to send warships to patrol Somalia's stretch of coast, which is Africa's longest and lies along key shipping lanes linking the Mediterranean with the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.
U.S. and NATO warships patrol the region to protect vessels in deeper waters farther out, but they are not permitted in Somali territorial waters. Despite those patrols, the heavily armed pirates approached the cruise ship about 100 miles at sea, underlining their increasing audacity.
The International Maritime Bureau has for several months warned ships to stay at least 150 miles away from Somalia's coast, citing 25 pirate attacks in those waters since March 15 — compared with just two for all of 2004.
Somali pirates are trained fighters with maritime knowledge, identifying targets by listening to the international radio channel used by ships at sea, Mwangura said.
"Sometimes they trick the mariners by pretending that they have a problem and they should come to assist them — they send bogus distress signals," he said. "They are getting more powerful, more vicious and bolder day by day."
but yeah, in all seriousness, I'm not sure i'd count Somalia as being a nation at the moment, or having a right to an area of ocean, especially if that area is being plagued by pirates. Something needs to be done, even if you could just go out of your way to avoid the infested waterways.
Love is a very powerful force, especially when its formed into a coherent beam of death.
Hunger does strange things to people...and Somalia is still a nation...even after our Marines went in there and trashed the place and killed many many way too many peeps.
Hunger is the reason the Marines went there. I don't know how many people died but I am pretty sure that they just wanted to feed people and make sure food routes remained open. Marines do not kill people for no reason. If someone died, there was a reason for it.
And those "pirates" are Muslim terrorists, so we may as well call them as such.
11-06-2005 10:11 PM
