▲ A vessel hijacked by Somalian pirates (December 2023)
Somalian pirates are resuming their activities by taking advantage of the attention being diverted to the war involving Iran, the British daily Telegraph reported on the 27th local time.
The Somalian pirates hijacked two Iranian fishing vessels on the 7th.
Last week, six hijacked vessels, including an oil tanker, were detained off the coast of Puntland, Somalia, and two of them were released on the 25th.
The Telegraph reported that these pirates are demanding about 30 million won per vessel.
These renewed acts of piracy are analyzed to be a fallout from the war involving Iran.
This is because Western military forces that had been patrolling near the Horn of Africa, the main stage for Somalian pirates, were redeployed toward the Red Sea and Gulf waters, causing the security network to loosen.
Somalian pirates are carrying out acts of piracy by using the MV Sword, a 100-meter-long cement carrier hijacked in April, as a mother ship acting as a forward maritime base.
This is a typical method they used 15 years ago when they were rampant.
Security officials in Puntland appealed to the newspaper that the pirates receive substantial support from local tribes, making punishment very difficult.
Although one of the pirate ringleaders who boarded the MV Sword and negotiated a ransom was arrested by local police, armed tribesmen attacked a police station in the city of Garacad the next day to break him out.
The police chief of Jariban, a coastal city in Somalia's Mudug region which is the center of pirate activity, was assassinated last week by the attackers who raided the Garacad police station.
Somalian pirates committed more than 1,000 attacks between 2005 and 2012, but afterwards, attacks decreased by more than 90% due to patrols by multinational navies and other efforts.
(Photo: AP, Yonhap News)
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