Somali pirates return after a decade of quiet

MOGADISHU (Reuters) – As a speedboat carrying more than a dozen Somali pirates approached their position in the western Indian Ocean, the crew of a Bangladesh-owned bulk carrier sent out a distress signal and called an emergency hotline.

No one reached them in time. The pirates climbed aboard the Abdullah, fired warning shots and took the captain and second officer hostage, Chief Officer Atiq Ullah Khan said in an audio message to the ship’s owners.

“By the grace of Allah, no one has been harmed so far,” Khan said in the message, recorded before the pirates took the crew’s phones. The company shared the recording with Reuters.

A week later, the Abdullah lies anchored off the coast of Somalia, the latest victim of a resurgence in piracy that international navies thought they had brought under control.

The raids pile up risks and costs for shipping companies that are also dealing with repeated drone and missile attacks by Yemen’s Houthi militia in the Red Sea and other nearby waters.

More than two dozen hijacking attempts since November have driven up prices for armed guards and insurance coverage and raised the specter of possible ransom payments, five industry representatives said.

Two Somali gang members told Reuters they took advantage of the distraction provided by Houthi attacks several hundred nautical miles to the north to return to piracy after lying dormant for nearly a decade.

“They have seized this opportunity because the international naval forces operating off the coast of Somalia have reduced their activities,” said a pirate financier using the alias Ismail Isse, saying he had helped finance the hijacking of another bulk carrier in December.

He spoke to Reuters by telephone from Hul Anod, a coastal area in Somalia’s semi-autonomous northeastern Puntland region, where the ship, the Ruen, was held for weeks.

Although the threat is not as serious as in 2008-2014, regional officials and industry sources are concerned that the problem could escalate.

“If we don’t stop it while it is still in its infancy, it could return to the same as it was,” Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud told Reuters last month at his heavily fortified Art Deco palace, Villa Somalia.

The Indian Navy intercepted and freed the Malta-flagged Ruen after it ventured back to sea this month. The European Union’s anti-piracy mission, EUNAVFOR Atalanta, said the pirates may have used the ship as a launching pad to attack the Abdullah.

The Indian Navy said all 35 pirates on board surrendered and the 17 hostages were rescued without injuries.

Cyrus Mody, deputy director of the International Chamber of Commerce’s anti-crime department, said the intervention by the Indian Navy, which has deployed at least a dozen warships east of the Red Sea, could have an important deterrent effect.

“This intervention shows that the risks and rewards are largely against the pirates, and hopefully that will give them some food for thought,” he said.

However, a Bangladeshi foreign ministry official told Reuters that the government was “not in favor of any form of military action” to free the Abdullah. The official, who asked not to be named to discuss a sensitive matter, cited the pirates’ advantages when operating close to the Somali coast.

Rising costs

The waterways off the coast of Somalia include some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. Every year, an estimated 20,000 ships, carrying everything from furniture and clothing to grains and fuel, pass through the Gulf of Aden on their way to and from the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, the shortest maritime route between Europe and Asia.

At their peak in 2011, Somali pirates launched 237 attacks and held hundreds of hostages, the International Maritime Bureau reported. That year, the monitoring group Oceans Beyond Piracy estimated that their activities cost the global economy about $7 billion, including hundreds of millions of dollars in ransoms.

The current number of attacks is significantly lower, with pirates mainly targeting smaller ships in less patrolled waters, maritime risk managers and insurers say. According to EUNAVFOR data, they have successfully seized at least two cargo ships and 12 fishing vessels since November.

But the mission – which as of February had identified up to five so-called pirate action groups operating in the eastern Gulf of Aden and the Somali basin – has warned they could advance further south and east at the end of the monsoon season this month.

Their raids have expanded the area where insurers impose additional war risk premiums on ships. These premiums will become more expensive for trips through the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea, adding hundreds of thousands of dollars to the price tag for a typical seven-day trip, insurance industry officials said.

Growing demand for private armed guards is also driving up prices. The cost of hiring a team for three days rose about 50% month-on-month in February, to between $4,000 and $15,000, maritime security sources said.

Although of limited use against Houthi missiles and armed drones, the guards have proven to be an effective deterrent against pirate hijackings.

No ransom payments have been reported, but pirate financier Isse and another source familiar with the matter said negotiations had taken place for a multimillion-dollar payout to free the Ruen.

A spokesperson for NAVIBULGAR, the Bulgarian company that manages the ship, said it could not comment on the ransom negotiations but was grateful to the Indian Navy for the release of its sailors.

A spokesman for Abdullah’s owner, SR Shipping, said the pirates had made contact through a third party, but the company had not received a ransom request.

Marking sources

Security experts say there is no evidence of direct links between the Houthis and Somali pirates, although Isse said the pirates were inspired by the militia’s attacks.

In response to the raids more than a decade ago, shipping companies have strengthened onboard security measures and international navies have joined operations led by NATO, the European Union and the United States.

As many as twenty warships from fourteen different countries are said to be patrolling the shipping lanes of the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean at any given time – an expanse the size of the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea combined.

The measures virtually eliminated pirate attacks. But as the threat subsided, participating countries reduced the number of warships, said John Steed, former head of the counter-piracy unit at the UN Political Office for Somalia.

“The ships of countries fly in and out of the various missions and return to the national command,” he said.

EUNAVFOR, the US State Department and the British Navy said they were committed to helping Somalia fight piracy. They did not respond to questions about whether the patrols were too thin or whether they would deploy additional resources.

Steed said another problem was the expiration in 2022 of a UN resolution allowing foreign ships to patrol Somali waters.

President Mohamud said the key to curbing the threat is to strengthen Somalia’s law enforcement capacity at sea and on land, “and not send many international ships.”

According to Somali government data, the coast guard has 720 trained members, but only one of the four boats is functional. The capital Mogadishu, Puntland and the breakaway region of Somaliland also have maritime police forces with limited resources.