Somali enclave to set up piracy courts, prisons

Reuters) - The Somali enclave of Puntland plans to set up special prisons and courts to try pirates in the Indian Ocean region in the next three to four months, a minister said last week.

The breakaway enclave of Somaliland and semi-autonomous Puntland, itself a centre of piracy, are seen as relatively stable compared with the rest of the Horn of Africa country, where a weak interim government is battling Islamist insurgents.

“In the next two weeks, the construction of the prison in Bosaso and Garowe will start, and also in Somaliland,” Saeed Mohamed Rage, Puntland’s minister of marine transport, ports and counter-piracy, told Reuters.

Pirates based in Somalia have turned busy shipping lanes off the coast of the conflict-wrecked state into some of the most perilous waters on Earth and cost the world billions of dollars.

The U.N. Security Council in April backed the idea of special courts to try captured Somali pirates but put off a decision on thorny details such as where to locate them.

The Puntland prisons would enable the establishment of two courts in Bosaso and Garowe to try pirates and will be set up in the next 3-4 months, Rage said in an interview in Dubai.

There were now more than 260 pirate inmates in Puntland’s prisons, he said. Asked about who will fund the prisons, he said: “The European Union will fund, in collaboration with Norway, and also mostly the UK.”

Puntland borders on Somaliland to its west, the Gulf of Aden to the north and the Indian Ocean in the southeast. The capital is Garowe, but commerce and business is concentrated in the port city of Bosaso.

Puntland signed an agreement with the Seychelles on the repatriation and transfer of sentenced pirates.

With Somalia lacking legal infrastructure, Kenya and the Seychelles have prosecuted dozens of suspects handed over by foreign navies. But both say they would have difficulties coping if all the seized pirates were sent to them.

A Russian-drafted U.N. resolution also urged all countries to criminalise piracy, saying the crime could be prosecuted anywhere no matter where it was committed, and called on states and organisations to fund prisons in Somaliland and Puntland.

Rage said attacks by pirates were increasing.

“It is really every day. It was supposed to decrease, but every day there is another active operation because of the payment rise and the payment of ransom. We have to get them all,” Rage said.

“We have to stop the payment of ransom, it will accelerate the pirates, their authority, and they will become another government,” he said. “The solution is not on the international community, but on the Somalis.”

At the beginning of the month, pirates were holding at least 29 vessels, ranging from fishing boats to tankers, holding their crews hostage and demanding multi-million-dollar ransoms.

The hijacking of ships near the coast of Somalia, where an Islamist insurgency and lawlessness has created a pirate safe haven, has cost the shipping industry millions of dollars.

Somali pirates release Greek-owned

ship, ransom paid

MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Somali pirates have freed a Greek-owned, Cyprus-flagged ship they seized in January after receiving a ransom payment, pirates and a piracy monitoring group said.

The pirates said they had released MV Eagle, a 52,163 deadweight tonne merchant vessel and its crew of 24 Filipinos seized in January, about 500 miles south west of Oman, while it was en route to India from Jordan. Pirates said they received a $6 million ransom for the ship’s release. “We have received our $6 million .... The ship has just started to sail away from our zone with a warship,” a pirate who only gave his as Kalif, told Reuters on Saturday by phone from the coastal town of El-Dhanane. The amount could not be verified, but Ecoterra, an advocacy group monitoring piracy in the Indian Ocean, confirmed a ransom was paid. “After having received a hefty ransom for the old bulk carrier, Somali buccaneers released the Greek owned and Cypriot-flagged MV Eagle. Vessel and crew made their way to safe waters,” it said in a statement.

Two decades of conflict in Somalia have allowed piracy to flourish off the lawless nation’s shores. Pirates typically do not kill crews held hostage in the expectation of receiving a ransom for a vessel’s release. Pirate gangs are making tens of millions of dollars in ransoms, and despite successful efforts to quell attacks in the Gulf of Aden, international navies have struggled to contain piracy in the Indian Ocean owing to the vast distances involved. The economic cost of piracy has been estimated at $7 billion to $12 billion per year, with shippers facing rising insurance costs that threaten to raise commodity prices.