Somalian Pirates have once again struck, this time hijacking a Ukrainian vessel carrying 33 Soviet T-72 Tanks. As always with Pirate attacks there’s good news and bad news. The Pirates have dropped their initial ransom demand of $35 million to just $5 million. They claim the reason for this discount is that the crew is Ukrainian as opposed to Western and that it’s really hard to get rid of 33 tanks.
I’m going to say the real reason for the price drop is that the Pirates have horrible timing. Cash ransoms don’t work real well on the verge of the utter destruction of the Western finical system. Hell, at this point I think they’re better off just keeping the tanks.
I think we can all agree that these Pirates are getting much more aggressive to the point that they now have tanks. I also think it’s fair to call for a War on Piracy. For more information on the insanity that is the high seas checkout this article from Newsweek: The Scourge of Somalia’s Seas.
At what point do we come to the conclusion that there is a rouge pirate fleet roaming the seas? I’m going to say we’ve walked that plank when 3 ships are highjacked within 5 days.
Two cargo ships have been hijacked in the Gulf of Aden between Yemen and Somalia, a Kenyan maritime official said Thursday.
“The ill-fated vessels under captivity are MV Lehmann and MV Arean,” said Andrew Mwangura of the Kenyan Seafarers Association.
The ships were taken Wednesday in roughly the same area where the Dutch-owned MV Amiya Scan was hijacked Sunday, he said. Mwangura did not know who owned the ships and had no more details on the hijackings.
The MV Lehmann and MV Arean hijackings would bring the number of attacks this year on ships near the Somali coast and elsewhere in the Gulf of Aden to 26, according to the International Maritime Bureau.
The bureau, which tracks piracy, said there had been 24 attacks as of Tuesday. Of those, seven were successful hijackings, the officials said.
A spokesman for the bureau said Thursday that no one was there to answer questions regarding the new hijackings.
Cyrus Mody of the bureau said earlier this week that Somali pirates seem to take ships “purely for financial gain.”
Financial gain my ass. These pirates are clearing building a fleet of pirate vessels to get revenge against the French Navy.