Heavily armed pirates have attacked two ships in the Strait of Malacca in the last week and are still holding the captain, chief engineer and an assistant engineer from one of the vessels as hostages, a sign of continued security problems in one of the world’s busiest sea lanes. Because both incidents appear to involve pirates operating from bases on the Indonesian side of the strait, the International Maritime Bureau regional piracy center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, has urged vessels passing through the strait to stay close to the Malaysian side of the waterway. With half the world’s oil shipments by sea passing from the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Malacca to east Asia, the strait trails only the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the gulf as an oil shipping lane.
| Ummm... Are you starting to get the impression there might be more than Dayaks and Long John Silver wannabes at work here? Or that there will be shortly... |
Fears that pirates and terrorists might join forces have been high since last autumn, when a speedboat packed with explosives hit a French tanker off Yemen, the Limburg, in an attack attributed to Al Qaeda.
| Yup. After sufficient repetition, the idea sinks home... |
The first of the two most recent attacks took place last Saturday night, when a large Taiwanese fishing trawler, the Dongyih, was fired upon by two tugboats at the northwest entrance to the strait, off the northern coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The ship’s captain, Lo Ying-shiung, was shot in the leg, but the ship did not slow down and made it safely down the strait to Singapore, where the captain has been hospitalized, said Noel Choong, the director of the piracy center of the maritime bureau, a nongovernmental agency run by commercial interests that works with Interpol.
| "Piss off, matey! I ain't stopping for the likes o' you!" |
Pirates have stolen six tugboats so far this year. Other vessels’ crews, including the Dongyih’s, seldom pay attention to tugboats and let them come close, making them attractive vessels for criminal activity. Singapore restricted the movements of tugboats in its waters earlier this year because of fears that terrorists would use them to mount an attack.
| They're common, and when they're legit they serve a useful purpose. |
Mr. Choong said that the second attack was more alarming, because it took place in a narrow area of the strait where ships have little room to maneuver and where attacks had previously been uncommon. Seven or eight pirates in a fishing boat armed with grenade launchers and M16 and AK47 assault rifles chased and boarded the Penrider, a small tanker carrying 1,000 tons of fuel oil, when it was close to the entrance of Port Klang, the main port for Kuala Lumpur. The attackers steered the ship across the strait into Indonesian waters while looting the crew’s cabins, then took the captain, chief engineer and an assistant engineer with them when they fled in another, waiting fishing boat, Mr. Choong said. The pirates have since sought a $100,000 ransom for the three.
| Holding people for ransom is a local cottage industry... |
John Fawcett-Ellis, the regional manager for Asia and the Pacific at the International Association of Independent Tanker Owners, said that the attack on the Penrider showed that not enough was being done to protect traffic in the sea lane. Pirates armed with assault rifles attacked three chemical tankers in the Strait of Malacca in February and March. During one of the attacks, the vessel traveled down the strait for an hour with no one in control. |