Nairobi, Kenya – A violent attack on a cruise liner off Somalia’s coast shows that pirates from the anarchic country on the Horn of Africa are becoming bolder and more ambitious in their efforts to hijack ships for ransom and loot, a maritime official warned Sunday.
Judging by the location of Saturday’s attack, the pirates likely were from the same group that hijacked a U.N.-chartered aid ship in June and held its crew and food cargo hostage for 100 days, said Andrew Mwangura, head of the Kenyan chapter of the Seafarers Assistance Program.
That gang is one of three well- organized pirate groups on the 1,880-mile coast of Somalia, which has had no effective government since opposition leaders ousted a dictatorship in 1991 and then turned on one another, leaving the nation of 7 million a patchwork of warlord fiefdoms.
Illustrating the chaos, attackers in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, threw grenades and exploded a land mine Sunday near a convoy carrying the prime minister of a transitional government that has been trying to exert control since late last year.
The attack, which killed at least five bodyguards, was the second in six months involving explosions near Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, whose internally divided government spends much of its time in Kenya.
Even before the attack on the liner Seabourn Spirit, Gedi had urged neighboring countries to send warships to patrol Somalia’s coast, which is Africa’s longest and lies along shipping lanes linking the Mediterranean with the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.
U.S. and NATO warships patrol the region to protect vessels in deeper waters farther out, but they are not permitted in Somali territorial waters. Despite those patrols, the heavily armed pirates approached the cruise ship about 100 miles at sea, underlining their increasing audacity.
The gunmen who shot at the Seabourn Spirit never got close enough to board the cruise ship, but one member of the 161-person crew was injured by shrapnel, according to the Miami- based Seabourn Cruise Line, a subsidiary of Carnival Corp.
Passenger Charles Supple, 78, of Fiddletown, Calif., recalled by phone Sunday how his companion woke him and said there was a boat beside the cruise liner. He said the boat held four men in ski masks, dressed in black and armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
“They were very agile in their boat,” he said. “We started hearing these things going ‘Ping! Ping! Ping!’ all over the ship. Then we realized it was an attack.”
The retired physician and World War II veteran said he took a picture of the boat, and one pirate fired a rocket at him.
“I dropped the camera and dived. The grenade struck two decks above and about four rooms further forward. I could tell the guy firing the bazooka was smiling,” Supple said.
