17 Filipinos among victims of new sea hijack

NAIROBI—Pirates seized a British-owned ship and a Taiwan-registered fishing boat with at least 17 Filipino crew members off the Horn of Africa on Monday.

The new hijackings brought to five the number of vessels taken by pirates since last weekend, marking a jump in the number of hijackings in the waters off Somalia this year, international maritime officials said Tuesday.

It brings the number of Filipino seamen in the hands of Somali pirates to 113.

The Taiwan-registered deep sea fishing boat was operating in the Indian Ocean near the Seychelles when it was hijacked. Nothing more has been heard from the crew of 30 since Monday, the Taiwan foreign ministry said in a statement Tuesday.

On board the Wen-fa No. 161 were two Taiwanese including the captain, five Chinese, six Indonesians and the 17 Filipinos, the ministry said.

The 32,000-ton British bulker Malaspina Castle had separately been reported as taken on Monday.

“It is UK-owned but operated by Italians. The crew is mixed but we are not sure of their nationalities,” Andrew Mwangura of the Mombasa-based East African Seafarers’ Assistance Programme said on Monday.

Nikolai Apostolov, head of Bulgaria’s Maritime Administration Agency, said 16 Bulgarians were on board.

The ships seized last weekend were identified as the French yacht “Tanit”, a Yemeni tug and the Hansa Stavanger, a 20,000-tonne German container vessel with a 24-man crew. Five of the crew were Germans. The nationalities of other crew members have not been ascertained.

Last March 28, Somali pirates released 12 Filipino seamen from the German-owned MV Longchamp, a gas tanker captured on Jan. 29.

The Department of Foreign affairs said that left 96 Filipinos still being held captive in Somalia. (The figure does not include the 17 new captives.) Among the captive Filipinos are those working on the captured ships MT Stolt Strength (23 Filipinos on board), MV Saldanha (19), MV Titan (17), MT Nipayia (18) and MT Bow Asir (19).

Including those earlier released, a total of 323 Filipinos on board 21 ships have been taken captive by the pirates off the east African coast, according to DFA statistics. There are also three other Filipino seamen on an oil supply ship that was captured recently by Nigerian rebels.

Foreign navies have rushed warships to the area and reduced the number of successful attacks. But there are still near-daily attempts and the pirates have begun hunting further afield near the Seychelles archipelago.

In the first three months of 2009, only eight ships had been hijacked in the Gulf of Aden linking Europe to Asia and the eastern Indian Ocean off the Somali coast, according to the International Maritime Bureau (IMB).

The pirates typically use speed boats launched from “mother ships”, which means they can sometimes evade foreign navies patrolling the busy shipping lanes. They then take captured vessels to remote coastal village bases in Somalia, where they await payment of ransom. - Philippine Daily Inquirer, April 08, 2009