Hijacking of cargo on the rise in Asia
Multimillion-dollar losses for companies It was mid-afternoon one day early this year when workers at a factory in the Malaysian state of Perak finished loading more than 700,000 condoms into a shipping container.The container was then driven to Port Klang, the busiest port in the country, and loaded onto a ship bound for Japan.It was a routine procedure for Sagami Rubber Industries, a Japanese company, but by the time the ship docked in the port of Yokohama at the end of January, the condoms had vanished."The container was empty," said K.K. Leung, the administration manager at Sagami's Malaysian factory, whose Japanese colleagues had alerted him to the theft.The case of the missing condoms made headlines in Malaysia, but it was not an isolated case, according to industry groups.Sagami, they say, was another victim of cargo theft, an underreported crime that sometimes includes violent hijackings.The transporting of goods through countries in the Asia-Pacific region is generally safer than in other parts of the world - like the Americas, Africa and Europe - according to data collected by FreightWatch International, an organization in the United States that collates information on cargo theft from around the world.But the organization's global threat assessment report ...
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