MOGADISHU, Somalia – Smugglers on a boat making an illegal crossing from Somalia to Yemen forced passengers into the Red Sea at gunpoint miles from shore, leaving at least 57 dead and about 100 missing, fishermen and a diplomat said Monday.
An estimated 200 Somalis and Ethiopians, including children, left Somalia’s semiautonomous Puntland region in two boats Wednesday. Their ultimate destination was Saudi Arabia, Jama Mo’alin Omar, a fisherman in the region, said by telephone.
The 18 smugglers — who were armed with guns, daggers and clubs — appeared to be trying to avoid detection when they forced passengers into the Red Sea while the vessels were about 10 miles from the Yemeni coastline, Omar said, citing information filtering to relatives in Puntland.
Thousands of Somalis and Ethiopians try to escape poverty in their countries by crossing the Gulf of Aden each year, many hoping to reach the more affluent Europe.
Husein Haji Ahmed, a Somali diplomat in Yemen, said 57 bodies have been recovered from the shore, 38 people survived and the rest are still missing. The bodies of the drowned were immediately buried, he said.
It was unclear what happened to the smugglers.
Survivors have been given tents to erect a temporary shelter near the coast and would later be transferred to a Somali refugee center 300 miles from the area, he said.
Somalia has been without an effective central government since clan-based warlords overthrew dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. Warlords then turned on each other, plunging the country of 7 million into chaos.
Seas Piracy is a largely unknown (by the public) problem all over the globe. One reason I sold my own boat some years ago, you can’t survive without firepower, and if you make port in most countries the locals can come aboard and search your craft for anything they think of. If they find weapons you are in very deep doodoo. So, as the saying goes, only the crooks are allowed to have weapons.
Here is a more recent report, one of hundreds you can find by a simple web search.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/10/31/1067566087272.html
<p>Piracy on the high seas has reached record levels and Indonesian waters are the most dangerous in the world, an ocean crime watchdog said yesterday. </p>
<p>The International Maritime Bureau said the number of reported attacks on ships leapt to 344 in the first nine months of this year, 26 per cent more than the 271 recorded in the corresponding period of 2002. </p>
<p>"This is the highest number of attacks for the first nine months of any year since the IMB piracy reporting centre began compiling statistics in 1991," bureau director Captain Pottengal Mukundan said. </p>
<p>He said there had also been an alarming rise in violence, with pirates using high-tech weaponry including sub-machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades, and knives. </p>
<p>The bureau said 20 crew members had been killed compared with six in 2002. Cases where guns were used jumped to 77 from 49.</p> <p>"This increase in violence is of great concern . . . there are hardly any cases where these attackers are arrested and brought to trial," Captain Pottengal said.</p>
<p> "It is only when the pirates face a greater risk of getting punished that we will begin to see a reduction in these figures."</p>
<p>Indonesian waters again topped the black list, recording 87 attacks. Bangladesh was ranked second highest with 37 attacks. </p>
<p>Attacks in the Malacca Straits, one of the most strategically important passages of water in the world, jumped to 24 from 11 in 2002. Thirty per cent of the world’s trade and 80 per cent of Japan’s crude oil is transported through the corridor between Malaysia and Indonesia. </p>
<p>The bureau warned recently that politically motivated forces could be behind some attacks. It said separatist rebels from Indonesia’s Aceh province could be behind a surge in attacks on oil tankers in the strait. </p>
<p>Some Western intelligence agencies and maritime security experts have linked the Indonesian acts of piracy to al-Qaeda, or militant groups linked to it. </p>
<p>Jemaah Islamiah, a group whose goal is to create an Islamic state, has also been named by experts as capable of hijacking a supertanker and exploding it in the straits. </p>
<p>African waters, too, are highlighted as dangerous, particularly off the coast of Somalia and Nigeria. By contrast, the bureau said countries such as Ecuador, Guyana, Malaysia and Thailand had shown a marked improvement. It said Malaysia was incident free in the past three months. It also reported a decrease in hijackings.</p>