COUNTER-PIRACY UPDATES

STATUS OF SEIZED VESSELS AND CREWS IN SOMALIA, THE GULF OF ADEN  AND THE INDIAN OCEAN (ecoterra - 16. September 2011)

PROTECTING AND MONITORING LIFE, BIODIVERSITY AND THE ECOSYSTEMS OF SOMALIA AND ITS SEAS SINCE 1986 - ECOTERRA Intl.
ECOTERRA Intl. and ECOP-marine serve concerning the counter-piracy issues as advocacy groups in their capacity as human rights, marine and maritime monitors as well as in co-operation with numerous other organizations, groups and individuals as information clearing-house. In difficult cases we have successfully served as mediators.
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STATUS-SUMMARY:

Today, 16. September 2011 at 23h45 UTC, at least 30 larger plus 18 smaller foreign vessels plus one stranded barge are kept in Somali hands against the will of their owners, while at least 504 hostages or captives - including a South-African yachting couple - suffer to be released.But even EU NAVFOR, who mostly only counts high-value, often British insured vessels, admitted now that many dozens of vessels were sea-jacked despite their multi-million Euro efforts to protect shipping.
Having come under pressure, EU NAVFOR's operation ATALANTA felt now compelled to publish their updated piracy facts for those vessels, which EU NAVFOR admits had not been protected from pirates and were abducted. EU NAVFOR also admitted in February 2011 for the first time that actually a larger number of vessels and crews is held hostage than those listed on their file.
Since EU NAVFOR's inception at the end of 2008 the piracy off Somalia started in earnest and it has now completely escalated. Only knowledgeable analysts recognized the link.
Please see the situation map of the PIRACY COASTS OF SOMALIA (2011) and the CPU-ARCHIVE ECOTERRA members can also request the Somali Marine & Coastal Monitor for background info.
- see also HELD HOSTAGE BY PIRATES OFF SOMALIA

and don't forget that SOMALI PIRACY IS CUT-THROAT CAPITALISM
WHAT THE NAVIES OFF SOMALIA NEVER SEE: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/05/fighting_for_control_of_somali.html

What Foreign Soldiers in Somalia and even their Officers Never Seem to Realize: The Scramble For Somalia
PEACE KEEPERS OR BIOLOGICAL WARFARE AGENTS ?
SG Ban Ki-Moon (UN) and President Ram Baran Yadav (Nepal) should resign and take the responsibility for 4,500 Haitians having been killed by a Cholera strain introduced by unchecked, so-called UN Peace-Keepers from Nepal into Haiti.
LATEST:
STILL OVER 500 SEAFARERS ARE HELD HOSTAGE IN SOMALIA !
ECOTERRA Intl. has been the first group to clearly and publicly state that the piracy phenomenon off the Somali coasts can only become an issue of the past again, if tangible and sustainable, appropriate and holistic development for the coastal communities kicks in. Solutions to piracy have to tackle the root causes: Abhorrent poverty, environmental degradation, injustice, outside interference. While still billions are spend for the navies , for the general militarization or for mercenaries or conferences, still no real and financially substantial help is coming forward to pacify and develop the coastal areas of Somalia.Updates on known cases of piracy  - pls see also below these latest news and in the status section.

ALERT - FOUR THAI HOSTAGES PLEAD FOR THEIR LIVES (ecop-marine)
Reports by a human rights monitor received from an area south of Eyl at Somalia's North-Eastern Indian Ocean coast revealed that the pirate group holding the four last hostages of the PRANTALAY fleet have threatened to execute the Thai nationals if the owner of the company - a man, who calls himself Dr. Thongchai Tavannapong and heads the Prantalay fleet of remaining 11 vessels, of which many are engaged in illegal fishing, and exports the loot under UNITED FISH PRODUCTS even into the US and the EU as well as Saudi Arabia - would not come forward and negotiate.for the release. The Royal Thai diplomatic mission in charge for the region as well as Thailand's Foreign Ministry have been informed.

VIETNAMESE BULKER IN SAFE WATERS AFTER HAVING BEEN RELEASED BY SOMALI PIRATES (ecop-marine)
Vietnamese-owned but Mongolia-flagged bulker MV HOANG SON SUN was released late Thursday after the Somali pirates had received a reduced ransom in the eight month hostage case.  The vessel is meanwhile in safe waters and reportedly on her way to Salalah harbour in the South of the Sultanate of Oman. The owner-manager, however, remained tight-lipped about the condition and fate of the crew.
BACKGROUND: (ecop-marine)
MV HOANG SON SUN : Seized January 20, 2010. The vessel MV HOANG SON HUN (IMO 8323862) was seized by pirates, who came onboard shooting at 12h42 UTC in position Latitude: 15°11N Longitude: 059°38, which is  approximately 520 nautical miles South East of the port of Muscat, Oman. The 22,835-tonne Bulk carrier is Mongolian flagged and Vietnamese owned, has a crew of 24 Vietnamese nationals and is carrying 21,000 tons of iron ore.
MV HOANG SON SUN was not registered with MSC(HOA) and had not reported to UKMTO.
Owner and manager of the Vietnamese vessel is HOANG SON CO LTD from Thanh Hoa City, Vietnam, who insured it with West of England Shipowners. Unfortunately for the seafarers it has no ITF agreement.
Nguyen Bien Cuong, head of the Hoang Son Co's maritime security department, said the last time his firm had heard from the Vietnamese crew of the cargo ship was Tuesday. However, according to the ship-owner (Hoang Son Company in Thanh Hoa province), the captured ship captain Dinh Tat Thang somehow managed to clandestinely send an email saying that all sailors are in safe condition and the merchant ship has been moved to a Somali port.  
Apart from that, Hoang Son Company has not received any other information, Vietnamese media reported.
Bui Viet Tung, son of chief mechanic Bui Thai Hung, one of hostages, is angry that the company has not made any contact with the pirates.
“If Hoang Son Company is not committed to the case, our family will go to Hai Phong northern city to seek more information on my father’s situation”.
On the same day, Hoang Son – deputy director of Hoang Son – told Tuoi Tre the company is working with a UK-based firm specialized in negotiating all things related to hostage and pirates to rescue the victims.
“The ransom is estimated to hit US$5 million,” Hoang Son added and stated that the vessel itself is insured against hijackers by the Vietnam Bank of Agriculture and Rural Development, but that the staff and goods on the ship have no insurance.   “If pirates ask for a huge ransom, there’s no way the company can afford it," Son said and added: "We need the support of the state and our insurer."
Based on this analysts believe that the case will take at least three month, because the British companies are known to take their time, because they are paid for it.
Crew and vessel were first held off Hobyo and then the vessel was moored off Ceel Dhanaane at the North-Eastern Somali Indian Ocean coast. Negotiations seem to have become difficult, which is why the captors decided mid July to take the vessel out to sea again. NATO, however, does at present not assess the vessel to be used as piracy launch.
On 28. July 2011 a report sent by a human rights monitor on routine proof of life mission, spoke of now only 22 crew members, some of which were held on land. It is so far not known if the 2 missing seamen died  or if they could abscond.
PIRACY INCREASES (ecop-marine)
The number of piracy cases also increased in West-Africa with three attacks in only one day on 14. September 2011, including the seajacking of  a Cyprus-flagged fuel tanker with 23 crew members off the Benin coast. Officials in Benin and Cyprus identified the hijacked vessel as the MT MATTHEOS I, carrying crew members from the Philippines, Spain, Peru, and Ukraine.
But also on the other side of the African continent the attack range of piracy expands with attacks inside the Red Sea basin:
On 10.09.2011at 05h35 UTC in position 14:04N - 042:51E, which is around 4nm off Jazirat Jabal Zuqar island, Red Sea, six alleged pirates in one skiff chased and fired upon a tanker underway, the IMB reported. The report continues:
"Another two skiffs were seen at a slight distance. The Master and all crew gathered on the bridge, sent May Day via VHF, increased speed, activated SSAS, contacted CSO, made evasive manoeuvres and locked all access to the ship. All crew except Master and Chief Engineer entered into safe-room. When pirates boarded the vessel the Master and Ch/Engr retreated into the E/Room too. A naval helicopter responded to the distress and arrived on location. A boarding team arrived and searched the vessel before releasing the crew. Later ships crew took control of the tanker and continued passage."
6 nights on - alleged spoor into Somalia gone cold
TRAGEDY IN PARADISE (ecop-marine)
Four wanted Kenyans and two Somalis are said to be the abductors of a British woman in Kenya, while an assuredly innocent local man from a minority people, who himself had been held under the gun by the attackers  is held for interrogation by local and international police forces, who are applying their various interrogation techniques ranging from beatings to more sublime methods and as primary scapegoat and fodder for the media.British citizens David, 58, and Judith, 56, Tebbutt had come to Kenya for a Safari and beach holiday. The British couple had been visiting the world renowned Maasai Mara game reserve in South-Western Kenya and flew last Saturday to Kiwayu at the North-East of Kenya's Indian Ocean coast. Kiwayu is a world famous beach resort north of Lamu, but unfortunately located not far from the Kenya-Somalia border.
The couple checked into the five star Kiwayu Safari Village and later had dinner. They were at the time the resort’s only guests.
Usually the power-generator illuminating the whole resort during evening hours is switched off after the guests leave the dining and bar to go to rest and solar lightning provides for undisturbed nights, while the lodge security is doing their round on night patrols. It was a night with pretty good visibility, a near full moon and beautiful moonlight over the lagoon.
But an armed gang of at least 9 men had staked out the premises since quiet some time.
It is not yet clear how many infiltrated shortly before midnight on last Saturday the lodge and attacked the sleeping couple after they had searched through two other of the naturally built cottages but found them only to be empty.
During the attack, David Tebbutt, apparently defending his wife and himself, was killed with a single shot to the head in what appeared at first as a robbery gone bad.
Mr. Tebbutt was a finance director with the publisher Faber & Faber and served two terms on the board with the Book Trade Charity, a group which offers support and grants to people in the publishing industry.
After the fatal shot had rung through he peaceful night and changed the whole situation of this peaceful place on earth in a split second, camp security allegedly staged an ambush around the area from where the shot was heard. But how much time passed between the moment of the shot and the guards actually finding the killed victim is not clear yet, since the lodge and all its employees were in a state of terror and not few of the employees had run into the dense growth of Doum-palms and other coastal vegetation surrounding the resort and spend the rest of the nightly hours hidden. 
Mr. Tebbutt's wife Judith from Bishop’s Stortford, Herts, believed to be partially deaf and to usually wear a double hearing aid, was later dragged down to the beach by two men, who had come from the beach-side as their footprints showed the next morning. Three spoors then led from the cottage of the couple back to the beach and it is believed that Mrs. Tebbutt was then bundled into a motorboat, which thereafter sped away from the isolated resort in the early morning hours of Sunday after having released a local man they had taken hostage earlier to guide them.
The motorboat had been silently brought into the Laguna with paddles or had been waiting nearby in order to be called in for the getaway or transport of the loot. Up to six men plus the woman as hostage then left the area by boat.
Also British counter-terrorism officials believe she was taken to a boat and that her captors brought her across the nearby border into Somalia.
Bloodhounds, kept by ranchers on the farms of white settlers in central Kenya's Laikipia district, who were flown in the next morning from Nanyuki also followed the clearly visible footprints in the sand from the cottage to the beach, but in and outside the lodge.could only point towards the empty ocean. Otherwise they pulled their handlers pretty much around in circles.
Some analysts, however, believe that the larger gang, which had planned the attack on the lodge and staked out the area for weeks, because they were not only observed but on 18. 08. 2011 as well as on 08.09.2011 reported to the area security organs, had held the staff of the resort under terror and siege and made their way back into the densely forested hinterland.
On Tuesday the media-hype, mostly based on speculations presented by a phony website reporting on Somalia, then reached a peak competing with numerous other unproven stories, but all pointing fingers towards an al-Shabaab involvement.
This especially because it was leaked that the Kenya navy had a fast boat on their radar, speeding towards Somalia throught he Kiunga marine reserve and asked the Kenyan Ministry of Defence for permission to intercept, which apparently was not granted.
Mayor Hassan of Kismayo, however, stated in a local radio-broadcast that Al-Shabaab had nothing to do with the abduction of the 56 year old woman and refuted claims by certain media that she had been brought to Kismayo as utter nonsense.
Kismayo is the capital of Somalia’s Lower Juba region which is controlled by Islamic militant group Harakat al-Shabaab al Muahidiin – a group on the terrorlist of several countries, thought to have links with the Taliban and the al-Qaeda networks.
Sheikh Abdulrahman Dheere, one of the Al-Shabaab leaders, immediately used the media attention to highlight incidences of US drone attacks in recent weeks, which were directed to destroy a base in Kismayo and a weapons depot at Luglow. Many al-Shabaab fighters were allegedly killed in both incidences. Especially the attack on the stores at Luglow, which is located on the road to Mogadishu just at the Equator north of Kismayo, in the first days of September 2011, had been completely neglected by the international media and went widely unreported.
Somalia's Islamist al-Qaeda-linked rebel group, al-Shabaab, told Reuters it was not behind Mrs Tebbutt's kidnapping. "Al-Shabaab has not abducted any Briton from Kenya. We believe bandits carried out the attack," a senior al-Shabaab official told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location. "We shall release a statement later that al Shabaab is not involved," the rebel official said.
Like many times in Kenya, the security forces concentrated on the red herring in their mislead search and then could only pound on the one witness, who actually came forward by himself.
Maintenance worker Ali Babitu Kololo, a former employee of the resort, stated he only gave the hostage-takers information after being forced to do so under duress and was held at gunpoint for 16 hours with constant threats to be killed.
The divorced dad-of-two, who turned himself in on the morning after the kidnap, reported he was forced to guide the bandits through the terrain.
A police source said: “Babitu said he was taken captive by the bandits and spent several hours as a hostage. They knew he had worked at the hotel and waited until dark before forcing him to lead them to the beach cottages.”
Friends of Babitu described him as a hard-working family man who had recently struggled to find work.
Farmer Bubun Omar, 50, told British news: “Ali reported he had been taken hostage earlier that day by a group of bandits. They grabbed him and held him in the dunes behind the resort. By the time it was night they ordered him to show them how to get into the resort and to the guest cottages." He added: “People have said Ali had joined al-Shabaab and was a bandit, but I knew him and I would never believe that.”
Kenyan Anti-Terrorist-Police did beat him after he was arrested, family members reported to a human rights organization. Since then Ali Babitu suffers from severe pain at the right side of his ribcage. On Monday he was briefly brought to a local hospital, examined and treated, but since then he was permanently held at the police-cells in Kiunga without being presented to a court of law. Such detention without court orders stands against the Kenya law and must be seriously questioned, especially because he also was held there to wait for foreign investigators to arrive and to whom he then was presented.
"To try and investigate or combat crime by committing serious human rights violations is not only unlawful, but a paradox," stated a spokesman from ECOTERRA Intl., a nature protection and human rights organization, which has extensive experience in the area and since years works with the minority people of the Aweer, an aboriginal minority people of hunter- gatherer culture - the very people from which Ali Babitu Kololo hails. Robbed of their traditional way to live by hunting by present day Kenyan laws the Aweer often just merely survive by renting themselves in a form of slave-labour to the more powerful strata of the coastal residents to clear their fields. "These people have suffered since decades under bandit groups from Kenya as well as Somalia and under atrocities and persecutions committed by the security organs in the area," the spokesman added. Many of the officers who are stationed in that region are said to have been dispatched into this remote part of Kenya in what is described as a form of punishment, because they earlier didn't perform elsewhere.
Just last week a Kenyan human rights activist had to be released from illegal detention in Uganda on terrorism charges, after he had been framed by Kenyan security organs and was deported to Uganda in the aftermath of the bombing in Kampala during the world football championship - an attack, which Al-Shabaab immediately declared as their work.
"Preliminary investigations and communications we had between us and experts from Interpol and other agencies indicate the gunmen seem to be acting on orders from a larger group of militia men," said the anti-terrorism source. "We have yet to get any communication from the kidnappers but they are most likely in Somalia," added Kenya's Criminal Investigation director Ndegwa Muhoro.
Meanwhile the beach resort has an unusually high occupancy rate: British officials, believed to be from Scotland Yard and personnel from the British Special Forces (SAS/SBS) were seen on the beach at the Kiwayu Safari Village in Kenya and joined by international staff of Interpol.
Scotland Yard yesterday confirmed officers had travelled to Kenya to help the country’s authorities. The Met Police spokeswoman said the team of officers would also be helping in the repatriation of Mr Tebbutt’s body.
The Foreign Office said in addition a team has been deployed to the area from the High Commission in Nairobi and called for those involved in the kidnapping to “show compassion”.
The British High Commission in Nairobi confirmed a team of plain clothes Metropolitan Police detectives are in Kenya to assist with the hunt.
The British Prime Minister revealed the Government’s Cobra committee has discussed the kidnap. David Cameron, 44, told the Commons: “We are doing everything we possibly can on this desperately tragic case.”
Foreign Secretary William Hague, 50, met relatives of the Tebbutts to reassure them everything was being done to find Mrs. Tebbutt.
The Tebbutt's only child, son Oliver Tebbutt, 25, is said to be 'devastated' by the tragic events.

Wednesday night Kenyan police arrested a second man over the kidnapping. He is suspected of being a friend of the first detainee, Ali Babitu. It was reported that a Somali man was detained by police and was being questioned in the town of Lamu. It's not known if he's a suspect, a person of interest or also a witness to the violent murder and kidnapping.
Both men are being questioned in custody and have apparently been forced to help the raiders under duress and while they themselves were being threatened to be killed.
These arrests of people, who most likely were themselves victims of the bandit group of the robbers turned kidnappers, and the now reported fact that at least one of them had made a phone-call into Somalia leading to the believe that local as well as foreign security organs now monitor all mobile phones in the area, let many to just switch off their phones, because they don't want to be also falsely accused. The open call by the Kenya police to the public to come forward and volunteer information is therefore in the meantime stonewalled by terrorised and intimidated local people. The insensitive police investigation under foreign pressure seems also not to take into consideration that the boundary between Kenya and Somalia is a colonial one, which cuts right through the natural habitat and the ethnic groups on both sides of the border, be it Somalis, Bajuni or Aweer..

No ransom demand for Mrs Tebbutt has yet been received and the family of the kidnapped Ulverston woman, including Judith Tebbutt's brother Paul Atkinson, 45, may have to wait several days before the kidnappers deliver their demands. This is another indication that the now-kidnappers hadn't planned for the crime in the way it evolved and might have the sold the victim on to a bandit or pirate-group with more experience in hostage for ransom deals, which would then certainly lead to a situation whereby she would be held for ransom inside Somalia for as long as it takes to get her released. Ecop-marine had warned since months that a plan by one pirate group had been revealed, which is linked to the sea-jacking of a South-African sailing couple, and who actually plotted at the time to kidnap rich holiday makers from the north-eastern Kenyan beaches, using the yacht from which the couple was snatched as decoy.
Judith Tebbutt, being a social worker who usually addresses the needs of patients with psychiatric difficulties at Kneesworth House in Bassingbourn might have to face the challenge of her lifetime, now having to deal  with psychopathic and psychotic members of a war-hardened criminal gang - her abductors.