Britain to boost its fight against Somali piracy
Britain is to boost its fight against Somali piracy by creating a new intelligence cell with the job of tracking the multi-million dollar money flows generated by buccaneering “kingpins”.
Ministers plan to despatch officers from the Serious and Organised Crime Agency to staff a new Indian Ocean unit dedicated to hunting pirate financiers, who provide start-up cash for gangs in return for the lion’s share of ransom proceeds.
A financier who offers as little $10,000 to equip a gang with skiffs, fuel and guns can easily expect a return of 10 or 20 times his money in the event of a successful hijacking.
But while such profits are now believed to run into tens of millions of dollars a year, relatively little is known about exactly where the cash ends up, beyond a widespread acknowledgement that it makes the gangs ever more powerful, and may also line the pockets of Somalia’s al-Shabaab Islamist movement.
“Pirate financiers are the kingpins of piracy,” said Henry Bellingham, Foreign Office minister for Africa, who will announce details of the new centre in a speech to the Chamber of Shipping in London on Wednesday. “Effectively targeting them will have a huge impact on the ability of pirates to terrorise the high seas.”
The new unit will be based in the Seychelles Islands, nearly 1,000 miles east of Kenya, which have now become a key forward operating base against pirate gangs as they spread their reach across the Indian Ocean.
Its creation comes amid growing concern at the pirate gangs’ ability to evolve their tactics against the efforts of the international anti-piracy fleet, who have now been pursuing them for three years with only limited success.
Most recently the gangs appear to have branched out into kidnappings on the mainland of neighbouring Kenya, with two foreign tourists separately seized in the past month.
Marie Dedieu, a disabled Frenchwoman in her sixties, was snatched from a holiday home in northern Kenya on Oct 1, not far from where British tourist Judith Tebbutt was snatched in early September.
Much of the counter-piracy efforts to date have been hampered by the lack of courts willing to try suspects arrested by foreign navies.
European courts fear pirates will try to seek asylum after being released, while Kenyan courts are often already overburdened – hence the much-criticised practice of “catch and release”, in which suspects are simply disarmed and then allowed to sail back to Somalia.
However, Mr Bellingham will claim that it is a “fallacy that pirates are not prosecuted or imprisoned”, pointing out that more than 1,000 pirates are now held in custody in over 20 countries, including three prominent leaders and financiers.
Arrangements are now also in place that will allow convicted pirates to be transferred back to prisons under construction in Puntland, the semi-independent region of northern Somalia from where much of the piracy is conducted.
Critics, though, fear that Puntland’s justice system is wide open to bribery, and say that in the past, many pirate financiers have simply “bought” their underlings out of jail.
They also point out that the prospect of a share of a multi-million ransoms means even the risk of a long sentence in a Somali jail is unlikely to deter many pirates from putting out to sea.
Source: The Telegraph
