ON BOARD THE NIVOSE: As the pirates zeroed in on their prey, the dazzling sun on the horizon concealed a nasty surprise: The ship they were hunting was not a merchant vessel but a French warship.
Sailing near the outer bounds of the Seychelles archipelago’s waters in the Indian Ocean yesterday just after dawn, the pirates spotted their potential victim from afar.
But the trademark 30-foot pirate “mother ship” escorting two small skiffs had been spotted long before by its intended prey, a French warship bristling with cannons, state-of-the-art radar technology and well-trained servicemen.
The frigate Le Nivose, one of the ships patrolling the region as part of the European Union anti-piracy mission Atalanta, made sure to keep the pirates thinking it was a merchant vessel.
“Visual on two skiffs.” Nivose Lt. Cmdr. Jean-Marc Le Quilliec dashes out of his cabin, certain that the pirates spotted by a Spanish vessel the previous day are at his mercy.
At around 0500 GMT, the French vessel moved into the sun to keep its cover. “They’re speeding right toward us,” Le Quilliec said. “Let’s just head into the sun and then we’ll turn around to hit them head on.”
When the unsuspecting pirates were close enough, the Nivose unleashed commandos on outboards and dispatched a helicopter to interdict the pirates, leaving them no chance.
“It’s the exact same location as the case of the Safmarine Asia,” Le Quilliec said, referring to an interception his ship carried out on April 15 during an attack on a Liberia-flagged merchant vessel. The helicopter fired two warning shots to stop one of the two skiffs from fleeing. There was only one pirate left on the mother ship, which was also intercepted moments later, with nothing on board except fuel and potatoes.
“He apparently thought the pirates had hijacked us,” said Le Quilliec.
The French forces found two Kalashnikov assault rifles on one of the skiffs, ammunition, a rocket-launcher and five grenades, which were deemed a hazard by the Nivose command and tossed into the sea.
The 11 captured pirates, some of them very young, looked exhausted and were made to sit on the deck with their hands on their heads as French forces searched them.
“The guys we catch are getting younger and younger,” said one navy soldier. “Look at this one, he can’t be 17.” Senior officers on the ship said a decision would be made later on whether or not the suspects would be transferred and where to.
Pirates elsewhere succeeded in hijacking a Pakistani-owned ship. The latest hijacking brings the pirates’ haul since the start of the year to more than 30 vessels, at least 18 of which are still being held, together with around 300 seamen, close to a third of them Filipinos.
The MV Al-Misan was captured Friday around 100 km off Mogadishu, said Ahmed Abdi, a pirate commander in the coastal village of Haradheere.
According to elders and traders in the region, it was transporting vehicles and commodities such as sugar and cooking oil for Somali traders and had been sailing from the United Arab Emirates.
