BOSASSO, Somalia: Somali pirates have hijacked yet another ship and are taking it and a French yacht with two French nationals aboard to their remote coastal base, a regional government official said yesterday.
A military spokesman said in Paris that French armed forces were ready to deal with the pirates. “French military means are present in the area, in Djibouti, which is a major military base, and at sea with the Courbet frigate,” said armed forces spokesman Christophe Prazuck.
The forces are “ready to fulfill any mission entrusted to them,” he said, though he said no operation to release the French nationals had yet been ordered.
An official with the Seafarers Assistance Program in Nairobi said the pirates were demanding more than $1 million to release the Carre d’as yacht and its crew, seized in the Gulf of Aden late Tuesday. Gunmen from the Horn of Africa nation are currently holding about 10 vessels for ransom at Eyl, a lawless former fishing outpost now used by gangs behind a sharp rise in attacks at sea.
They are already demanding more than $9 million to free two Malaysian tankers, a Japanese-managed bulk carrier and a Nigerian tugboat held there.
Egypt’s Foreign Ministry confirmed an Egyptian ship was seized, state news agency MENA said. Egypt was working through its embassy in Kenya to identify the ship and its crew, MENA reported, although no one had yet taken responsibility for the seizure.
Heavily armed gangs have seized at least 30 vessels so far this year in the Gulf of Aden, making the shipping lanes between Somalia and Yemen the most dangerous in the world.
The French Foreign Ministry said a UN Security Council resolution in June gave France the right to pursue the pirates into Somali waters, but that it had to consider the best way to save the hostages. In April, French commandos launched a helicopter raid to arrest six Somali pirates after they freed the 30-strong crew of a luxury yacht they had hijacked days earlier.
Somali regional officials say the hefty ransoms paid out by ship owners are fueling corruption and an explosion of piracy offshore that they are unable to contain.
“We have no power to control the multiplying numbers of pirates,” Ahmed Saed Ow-Nur, Puntland’s minister for fisheries and marine resources, told Reuters. “Even some of the Puntland police are involved in piracy, because they can make quite a lot of money.”
