Somali pirates suspected of staging first attack since 2012

NAIROBI: Suspected pirates have boarded a tanker and forced its Sri Lankan crew to change course towards the northeastern Somali coast, in what could be the first such attack since 2012.

“What we know for sure is that a small tanker has been attacked and has diverted course,” John Steed, a former British army officer who heads the Horn of Africa section of the Oceans Beyond Piracy NGO, said on Tuesday.

“Whether this is a pirate attack needs to be confirmed. For example, we do not know what the demands of those men are.

But this looks pretty much like the old piracy attack scenario,” he said.

The Aris 13, a ship run by a company based in the United Arab Emirates, was seized on Monday with eight Sri Lankan crew members on board.

Earlier reports said the vessel was Sri Lankanflagged, but the foreign ministry in Colombo denied the claim.

“The ministry is taking action to verify the alleged incident, and initial enquiries have revealed that while the vessel involved is not registered under a Sri Lankan flag, it has an 8-member Sri Lankan crew,” it said in a statement on Facebook.

The vessel was carrying fuel from Djibouti to Mogadishu when it was hijacked.

Its crew sent a distress signal on Monday afternoon, Steed said. “Yesterday afternoon, the ship reported that it was followed by two skiffs.

After that, it went silent and the owner of the ship was not able to get into contact,” he said.

A search for the Aris 13 was under way off the Somali coast on Tuesday.

The ship was forced to dock near the town of Alula, in northeastern Somalia’s semiautonomous region of Puntland.

“There has not been an attack of a commercial ship by Somali pirates since 2012,” Steed said.

The European Union Naval Force has sent a maritime patrol aircraft to the coast of Somalia to investigate reports that Somali pirates have seized a commercial vessel, a spokeswoman for the force said on Tuesday. “The aircraft is en route,” she said. She said the force known as EU Navfor, which runs anti-piracy operations in the area, does not classify the incident as piracy so far.

One of the suspected pirates, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told a regional radio station that the ship was being held off the northeastern port of Alula.

“We are not pirates, but fishermen,” he said, adding that the ship was seized because it was dumping toxic waste into the sea.

He said the 10-member crew had clashed briefly with their kidnappers,but that no one was injured. There were no initial comments from Somali officials.

Somali pirates began staging waves of attacks in 2005, seriously disrupting a major international shipping route.

The epidemic, which in 2012 cost the global economy $5.7 billion to $6.1 billion, prompted interventions by the United Nations, the European Union and Nato. Many commercial shippers began hiring private armed guards for their vessels.