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7. OTHER

The Yemen Connection

Pirate attacks on Yemeni fishing ships, which are then converted for use as pirate motherships, have been well documented, and there are some indications that the Victoria gang may have been guilty of a double hijacking, the first involving a Yemeni vessel.

According to Hussein Hersi, his cousins left Somalia in two small attack skiffs, but both Matei Levenescu and Traian Mihai reported being attacked by one boat between ten and twelve metres in length. Is it possible that the Victoria hijackers departed Somalia in smaller skiffs, and then proceeded to hijack a Yemeni dhow somewhere in the Gulf of Aden, abandoning the vessel’s previous occupants in their skiffs?

“The Somali side of the Gulf is too well patrolled by foreign warships,” Hersi told me, “and the commercial ships stay two or three hundred miles away from the Yemeni coast. So the pirates go over to the Yemeni side; they pretend to be Yemeni fishermen, but at night they attack the actual Yemenis and capture their fishing dhows. “They’re always changing tactics, you know. The warships go this way, the pirates go the other,” he said, motioning in two directions with his hand.

It was not clear if Hersi was referring to his cousins’ gang in particular, or to the practices of Gulf of Aden pirates in general. But the dimensions of the attack ship described by Levenescu and Mihai fit the proportions of a small Yemeni dhow; and the fact that the Victoria was captured only 120 kilometres south of the Yemeni coast confirms that the pirates had been operating from the Yemeni side of the Gulf of Aden, and had quite possibly hidden from coalition forces by pretending to be Yemeni fishermen.

On the other hand, Computer’s psychic timeline, as reported by Hersi, allowed only eight hours between launching the mission and encountering the Victoria. If so, the pirates would have barely had enough time to reach Yemeni waters and hijack the dhow before meeting the Victoria (at a top speed of twenty knots, the hijackers would have needed almost seven hours just to reach the position where they encountered the Victoria).

Relationship with the Puntland Authorities

No blanket statement can define the “typical relationship” between pirate gangs and the Puntland government forces, which has ranged from direct armed confrontation to allegations of complicity and outright involvement. As evidence of possible corruption, Hansen cites Boyah’s statement that 30 per cent of ransom money goes to bribes (in my view an absurd claim, which Boyah has since retracted on multiple occasions). But another of Hansen’s interviews suggests a more evasive strategy: “We usually hide ourselves and put the ship we capture in (sic) far from the shore and move from place to place when we see [the Puntland police] around,” said a pirate named Sultan.

Their actions show that the Victoria gang came closer to adopting the latter approach, as illustrated from their flight from Eyl upon my arrival with government forces. Though Levenescu suggested that the purpose of their departure was to harvest drinking water, the timing of the trip may have been influenced by the sudden appearance of uniformed government soldiers in Eyl, several of them closely related to President Farole himself.

Finally, by electing to spend its money on soldiers’ uniforms rather than on bribes, the gang coped with the Puntland authorities through subterfuge rather than confrontation or negotiation. One must wonder if even this minimalist effort was necessary; when I was in Eyl I saw no local authorities worth bribing, and no military presence other than my own escort.

Appendix 3

Piracy Timeline

1991: The Somali state collapses as rebel factions descend on the capital, Mogadishu. President Mohamed Siad Barre flees the country.

JANUARY 12, 1991: In the first recorded piracy incident in modern Somalia, the cargo ship MV Naviluck is boarded by bandits off Puntland’s coast. Part of the crew is taken ashore and executed, while the boat is ransacked and subsequently