We will now be lending our expertise to help them. In , Somali pirates took more than a thousand hostages in raids on over ships, many in the central Indian Ocean, and earned at least a hundred million dollars. In many cases, ships were captured, ransomed, and released within weeks.
At the peak of the piracy outbreak in January , Somali pirates held hostages and 32 boats. Between and , more than 2, crew were taken. Last hostages held by Somali pirates released after five and a half years A team of negotiators specialising in forgotten hostages secured the release of the three Iranian crewmen after their vessel was hijacked in Nicky Harley.
Read More. Somali pirates release three Iranian hostages held for five years. Gunfight at sea as pirates try to storm tanker off Yemen coast. Somali pirates hijack Panama-flagged ship in first seizure since We sat on thin mattresses, free to walk around but not free to visit the toilet stall without permission. A Somali man who may have been a livestock doctor came to inspect my wrist. He sewed a thin wooden splint around the throbbing joint and said it would heal in three weeks.
It took six. Then I tried to sleep; but before dawn Rolly and I were loaded into a Land Rover and driven across the bush by pirates who seemed to be in a nervous panic. We drove at random, for several hours, until dark fell. Nine Somali guards had been killed.
The kidnappers were different from mine, but the pirate kingpin Mohammed Garfanji had financed both abductions. He lost a relative in the raid. The Somalis in the front of our Land Rover were agitated.
One of them, who the men called Ahmed Dirie, had rotten teeth and brown, stained-looking eyes. His face looked half-melted with anger and he kept an ammunition belt strapped around his pot belly.
He and his driver, Muse, quizzed me while we drove across the desert bush. They knew I was American, and they thought the Buchanan rescue had something to do with me. But I would not learn the full story for weeks. We settled in a dusty wooded valley. The Somalis let us sit freely, like kindergarteners, on foam mattresses under a tree.
Now he looked almost dapper, with a half-bald head and a tough, small, sparkplug frame. On our first morning in the valley, after a breakfast of cold rice, Rolly started to talk. He was an old Catholic fisherman from the Seychelles. Pirates had caught him and his friend Marc three months earlier, in late Their trip to Hobyo, at gunpoint, took seven days.
Rolly spoke a comical, French-inflected English. I bring chicken, saucissons, like that. One of the Somalis noticed. With his bare foot, from behind, the pirate kicked the sausage overboard.
His Muslim sensibilities were offended by pork sausage. They thought that he was too light-skinned to be African. In fact he was one-quarter Chinese. Is a lot of money. You can buy house, you can buy car. T he nighttime raid by US Navy Seals had rescued Buchanan and Thisted in open savannah, at night, but the Somalis kept us outdoors in the weeks and months that followed.
They boasted on the phone to journalists but took no serious precautions, apart from hiding us under some trees. We moved back to houses in Hobyo after three weeks only because of a rainstorm. I had the impression that the pirates were making the whole thing up as they went along. They had no clear plan to extract a ransom or hand me back. They just made outrageous demands. One night in late February, a month after my capture, the guards hauled me in a Land Rover, alone, to a remote part of the bush to meet the pirate kingpin.
I had heard of Garfanji but never seen a picture. He was a powerful criminal, with a reputation for cruelty as well as kindness to his own men. The person I met in the bush that night seemed groggy and dull-witted; he sat cross-legged in the dust and spoke in a high, almost childish voice. He dialled a private American negotiator on his softly glowing smartphone.
I had the false idea that somebody was in control. After a brief conversation he connected me to my mother in California, and hearing her was like hearing music for the first time in weeks. But the call was fruitless, like most of these ransom conversations. The pirates wanted too much. After the call, Garfanji searched his phone for the sound file of a news report about the Buchanan rescue.
If they try it with you, we will shoot you. He tapped his phone to start the file and tossed it in the dust. I heard a clip from what sounded like an Al-Jazeera broadcast, which explained in clear English that two aid workers held captive in Somalia since autumn had been flown by US helicopters — alive — to the American base in Djibouti.
My heart thumped with glee. W hen we returned to Hobyo that night, I lay awake in the darkened house, under a mosquito net, thinking about the report. Nine dead pirates would complicate negotiations. A ransom seemed hopelessly far away. I tried to imagine a rescue in that house, which seemed to be a half-built pirate villa waiting for a last infusion of cash.
The walls were half a metre thick. The windows had metal mesh screens instead of glass. A concrete wall surrounded the house. A shootout here would be ugly, I thought.
My door to the front porch was flimsy wood, and the guards sat right outside, on a woven mat. Two or three stayed up all night by chewing khat. Khat was far more important to them than the fishing war off the Somali coast. They chewed it whenever they could, not just at night. They had to be locked with me in these prison houses like hostages — a separate runner came and went with keys — so nothing excited them more than the daily arrival of fresh bundles of khat. Most Somalis are Sufis, and chewing khat is one indulgence that sets them apart from the more puritan Salafists in the militant group al-Shabaab.
Still, they were quite devout. Five times a day they took turns on a clean mat and mumbled a prayer towards Mecca. One day I asked a guard about his beliefs.
He laughed and rattled a translation to the other guards. He straightened up in his chair and tapped his chest. Because in Somalia, hungry-problem. Bashko was my friend among the guards, a quick-minded, bantam kid in his 20s with clever eyes and a flashing smile. I wanted long, detailed conversations with him — I wished intensely for a translator — but with our pidgin mix of English and Somali we could only speak in broad terms.
The theological problem nagged him, though, and after a week or two he answered my question. He said the Koran called for struggle against nonbelievers.
Thieving from infidels therefore was not theft. One sura, , the so-called Verse of the Sword, does mention kidnapping, and it is often used as an excuse for hostage-taking and even violent jihad. But we had no Koran in the prison house. In fact, I rarely saw the men read. F or the first few months of we heard regular surveillance in the air, and the roar of a low-flying Orion plane, every few days, would give me a thrill of reassurance and hope.
It had the opposite effect on my guards. They wanted me to keep my mouth shut every time a plane came near because they thought sophisticated American listening devices could locate the sound of my voice. In late March, members of the same pirate gang hijacked a long-line tuna ship off Somalia and anchored it near Hobyo. Rolly and I had to move onboard in mid-April. The idea, I think, was that US helicopters would be less likely to descend on a rusted industrial fishing boat filled with two or three dozen hostages than they were on a house or a camp in the bush.
A few weeks later, in May, the pirates moved us back to land for 24 hours. That was a bitter joke, and what followed would shape up to be the strangest and most appalling day of my life.
We drove through the dry bush for an hour. The cars made their way to a sloping wooded area where other cars, and other Somalis, waited under the trees. The men marched Rolly away behind a thicket. They led me to a cluster of tangled trees. I saw a group of men, heavily armed, with rocket launchers and AKs, standing or squatting in the dust.
Some wore turbans and keffiyehs. Most were older and seemed to be ranking pirates or clan leaders. They watched me with wary eyes for a reaction, like large predatory cats. Rolly dangled upside-down from a tree. They had tied him by the ankles to a heavy bough. A fat, deep-black man with a high voice whacked him on the chest and feet with a bamboo cane.
Two teenagers filmed it. Other Somalis ran up to kick Rolly in the ribs. They seemed to enjoy themselves. He just closed his eyes and let it happen. I wondered if he was in shock. The fat man was Mohammed Garfanji.
He handed his cane to another Somali and came up the slope, where he squatted some distance from me and squinted. Do you remember me? Other men kicked him. I was about to say that Rolly spoke no Hebrew; but that could have led to an awkward line of questioning.
A more junior boss, Ali Duulaay, squatted next to Rolly in the dust with a lit cigarette. Duulaay had organised both of our kidnappings. Garfanji was the financier, as far as I understood — he sat at the top of a number of interrelated pirate gangs — but Duulaay was a direct gang leader.
He was lean but strong, about 40, with acne-marked skin. A little game occurred to him now. Bakayle taunted the old man about his ransom. At last the pirates lowered him to the ground. He lay on his side, propped up on one elbow, to recover his breath. I went to sit near him and asked the Somalis for food and water. One guard brought a bottle and box of cookies. But now it was my turn. Garfanji bellowed my answer to the assembled bosses, who hollered their dissatisfaction and shook their weapons.
He kept a keffiyeh wrapped around his face, so it was hard to tell; but the resemblance was chilling. I have looked into your bank account! I know how much money you have. That tripped him up. He wanted to accuse me of having more, but from the way he dissembled I gathered he had not cracked my account. They are not satisfied. The United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Somalia, Nicholas Kay, said today "I am grateful to see the longest held hostages released from Somalia, and thank all those involved who made it happen, especially the regional authorities in Galmudug".
United Nations. Office on Drugs and Crime. Site Search. This is the longest period of captivity endured by any hostages taken by Somali pirates.
0コメント