The Egyptian Foreign Ministry is working on the diplomatic front to free an Egyptian cargo ship which was hijacked in the Gulf of Aden off the Somali coast. The vessel al-Mansourah was sailing under the Panamian flag from Pakistan to Djibouti, with 25 crew on board and a cargo of 15,000 tons of cement, when it was hijacked. The pirates demanded a ransom payment to free the vessel and crew, the Foreign Ministry said, but did not specify how much the ransom money demanded was.
Andrew Mwangura, the coordinator of the East Africa Seafarers Assistance Program (SAP) said the Mansourah was the 10th vessel to be hijacked in the pirate-infested waters of Somalia since last month. The hijack, he said, occurred on the same day that a French yacht was also seized. The yacht was sailing towards Eyl, a former fishing region that is now a base for the pirates who have been staging the attacks against foreign vessels.
Dangerous waters
Piracy has surged this year in the Gulf of Aden, part of an important shipping route from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal. The latest attack came as UN Special Representative for Somalia Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah called for international action to combat a surge in piracy in the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia. “This piracy is increasingly a threat to international navigation and free trade in an already fragile environment. The millions of dollars in ransom paid to the pirates and their associates inland and overseas has become a multi-million dollar business which threatens stability in Puntland and in Somalia as a whole,” said Ould-Abdallah.
Somalia’s transitional federal government, which has no navy and is embroiled in combating a bloody insurgency, has been unable to control the pirates. Mwangura said more than 30 ships were attacked in the area this year, making that stretch of the coastline one of the most dangerous in the world. Somali gunmen, he said, are currently holding captive 184 crew members of nine vessels.
The UN Security Council in June approved incursions into Somali waters to combat the pirates. Ould-Abdallah welcomed this move by saying that it is time for a “collaborative effort to put the resolution into effect.” Malaysia has said it was sending three warships to the Gulf of Aden after two of its ships were hijacked with the loss of one life. A multi-coalition naval force has been deployed to patrol what is among the world’s most dangerous waters.
Crew safe
The Mansourah is owned by the Red Sea Navigation Company. Hossam Zaki of the Foreign Ministry said that the hijackers had not made any specific demands. Abdel-Megid Matar, director of the Red Sea Navigation Co, and Saad Gharib, manager of the company’s Cairo branch, both said they were waiting for the Foreign Ministry’s diplomatic efforts to bear fruit and free the Mansourah and its crew. They had lost contact with the vessel since Wednesday 3 September, they said, till the Captain Abdullah Hammad called his wife Samar Abdel-Latif a few days later and told her all the crew members were safe and sound.