E-MAIL THIS LINK
To: 

The Rise and Fall of Somalia’s Pirate King
From Foreign Policy via Garowe News. Just the opening paragraphs here.
As the Somali piracy blockbuster Captain Phillips raked in $26 million in its opening weekend on U.S. screens, Mohamed Abdi Hassan, better known as "Afweyne," was on a flight to Belgium with gainful plans to sell a very different story about East African marauders. Expecting to consult on a movie based on his life as a seafaring bandit, Afweyne and his associate were instead arrested by Belgian police and charged with the crimes of piracy and hostage taking. The two men had fallen for a hard-to-believe, reverse-Argo ruse -- a months-long sting operation set in motion to catch the mastermind behind the 2009 hijacking and ransom of the Belgian-owned dredging vessel Pompei.

While some 1,000 Somali pirate foot soldiers have been jailed in over a dozen countries, Afweyne --whose sobriquet means "big mouth" or "crybaby" -- will be the first pirate leader to be prosecuted by the international community when his criminal trial opens in Belgium.

Though his hopes of being immortalized on the big screen have been dashed, Afweyne, more than any other pirate, is responsible for making Somali piracy into an organized, multi-million-dollar industry. According to a recent World Bank report, Somali piracy raked in an estimated $339 million to $413 million in ransom spoils between 2005 and 2013. Like many of his comrades, Afweyne asserts that he not a "kidnapper," but the leader of a "legitimate self-defense movement" dedicated to protecting Somalia's marine resources. While some of Somalia's first pirates operating from the autonomous region of Puntland could claim -- for a time -- to be "coastguards" levying a taxes on illegal foreign fishing, Afweyne was not one of them. Rather, he was shrewd businessman who sought to replicate Puntland's cottage pirate industry on a commercial scale, based out of his native Harardhere in central Somalia.
More on the 'crybaby' at the link including how he managed to build his piracy empire. Quite the business man...

Posted by: Steve White 2013-11-07
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=379148