Somalia again – where’s the mothership?

According to the IMB, pirates attacked more than 130 merchant ships in the Gulf of Aden last year (2008), more than double the number the previous year (2007).

Yesterday (April 5, 2009) German newspapers Bild and Welt reported the highjacking of the German freighter Hansa Stavanger.

Astonishingly, the German ship was highjacked some 400 nautical miles from the coast of Somalia.

March 5, 2009, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine, published a picture of the boat where several pirates were apprehended by a German warship. About ten people are on board. The pirate ship has 2 rather small engines. When we zoom the image, the engines seem to have 45 HP each. Nowhere in sight can you find engine fuel cans.

How can a small boat with such small engines carry the occupants so far from the coast of Somalia?

This picture is additional proof – like we needed more proof – that the existence of a mothership from where these small boats are launched is a reality!

When will someone do something about this? What more does it take to have the military authorities search for the mothership?

Piracy — Who’s to blame?

The creation of this blog coincided with the release – by the Somalian pirates – of two ships that had been held for ransom for several months. The Ukrainian cargo ship FAINA was released after the pirates reached a deal with the owners of the arms-loaded ship seized September 25, 2008. Then, a Chinese fishing boat and its 24-member crew were released, after being held by Somali pirates for three months.

This is good news. With September as its worse month (39 attacks, according to the IMB Piracy Reporting Center), 2008 was a bad year for sea farers. Most of the attacks were kept unnoticed by the international media, but the ones that were reported by the media were enough to launch the discussion about security and sea traveling.

The word “pirate” comes from the ancient Greek peiratés, which came to mean “those that seek luck at sea”. The Roman emperor Julius Caesar, himself, is said to have been captured by pirates, who asked for a large ransom. The ransom was supposedly paid, but Caesar’s vengeance was quick and bloody.

Although the term itself is not used, the first historical reference to pirates dates from the time of the pharaoh Akhenaton when some “peoples of the sea” – supposedly mercenaries from Kafftor (normally considered to be the island of Crete) – who, after attempting with no success to invade and pillage Egypt, integrated the royal guard of Egypt during the reign of Ramses II.

I will not take sides on the dispute about the interpretation of the ancient inscriptions that deal with this subject. The important idea that I take from this historical debate is that from the beginning of civilization, as soon as humans discovered how to travel by sea, this means of transportation was used to attack other humans.

Therefore, it does not surprise me that people from a country in which there is no controlling law started uncontrolled attacks against ships that pass near their coast. This seems to be the reason why Somalian pirates turned the Gulf of Aden into a complicated place to navigate in.

However … how can a small boat like the ones shown as attackers go so far from the coast? They have speed … but they burn fuel. And there is no way a small boat like that can carry enough fuel to travel 200 nautical miles and still have enough fuel to pursue a “prey”.

The possible presence of a mother-ship should therefore be investigated. And the level of organization displayed by the pirates allows us to think that probably there is a mastermind behind the attacks.