by Ross Kemp
The bridge of the Northumberland had no idea anything was happening until it picked up something odd on the radar. Saldanha, which had been doggedly plotting its course along the corridor, had now changed direction. It was no longer part of the convoy. Instead, it was heading towards the coastline of Somalia.
Commander Simpson’s face was grim when he realized what was happening, and a tenseness fell upon everyone in the ship. The officer operating the radio tried to make contact: ‘MV Saldanha, MV Saldanha. This is coalition warship Foxtrot 23. Channel 16. Over.’
Silence on the airwaves. Saldanha wasn’t responding.
We couldn’t hear it, but we could see it – a blip on the radar travelling off route, away from the corridor and towards the coastal town of Eyl. And if it was going to Eyl, that could mean only one thing.
Eyl is situated in the Puntland region of Somalia from which most of the pirates originate. Only a few years ago it was little more than a poor fishing town – some boats, a few shacks and a population of impoverished Somalis. All in all, not much different from the rest of the country. But Eyl has undergone a transformation, and that transformation has occurred because it is a modern-day pirate town, the lair of the people wreaking havoc in the Gulf of Aden. The shacks are still there, but they are now accompanied by signs of wealth. There are restaurants, for example, and four-by-fours driven by men in suits. The number of people engaged in actual piracy is relatively small, but a whole economy has sprung up in Eyl to service their needs. Whenever a vessel is pirated, wealthy middlemen appear. They have new weapons and shiny cars, and you can bet your bottom dollar they didn’t acquire these status symbols by honest, straightforward means. Houses are being built along the coastline surrounding Eyl – not the poor places that are the mainstay of the rest of the country, but large properties for the successful practitioners of Puntland’s illegal profession.
Commander Simpson immediately changed Northumberland’s bearing to follow the Saldanha. It was eight miles away and moving steadily in a south-easterly direction. There had been no distress call from the ship, but everyone knew that her drastic change in course was not a good sign. The Merlin crew was scrambled, and I took to the air with them once again. We needed to get to the merchant vessel as quickly as possible. The bridge must have been taken, but maybe other parts of the ship hadn’t. Perhaps we could help the crew with covering fire, although nobody was under the illusion that the odds were in our favour.
On the bridge, Northumberland continued trying to contact the vessel. ‘MV Saldanha, MV Saldanha. This is coalition warship Foxtrot 23. Over.’
A deafening and very meaningful silence.
The Merlin approached. Once more, the Saldanha appeared on the screens in the cockpit. The bridge and the upper deck were clearly visible. No sign of anyone, or anything.
And still, nothing from the captain of the ship.
Then the radio burst into life.
It was the Saldanha’s captain, his accented English strangely emotionless as he updated the warship on their situation. ‘Saldanha captain speaking. We are under a hostage situation. Control of the vessel is seized by pirates.’
‘How many crew do you have on board?’ the radio operator requested.
‘We are 22. For the moment all of them OK.’
For the moment. But you don’t take hostages if you’re not prepared to hurt them.
Suddenly the Merlin picked up something on the Saldanha’s bridge. The crew reported back to Northumberland, ‘Captain, there is a two-person visual on the bridge roof.’
The order came through to load the GPMG. ‘Load gun. Roger, load gun.’ The gunner had eyes on. We were one squeeze of the trigger away from an air-to-sea battle.
More info from the Saldanha’s captain: ‘The pirates request to stay away and not to transmit any other message to them.’
Our options had been cut short. The Merlin had some powerful weaponry trained on the enemy, but it was as good as useless. Fire on the pirates and we risked two things. First, a counter-attack, using RPGs, on the helicopter. It would have been a brave move by the pirates, but then their bravery was something nobody could call into question. Second, retaliation aimed not at us but at the hostages. So far in the Gulf of Aden pirates had refrained from harming their hostages, and they knew it was in everyone’s interests to keep it that way.
Commander Simpson’s options were limited. He could monitor the situation, observe the Saldanha’s movements. But he couldn’t take any military action. He couldn’t board the vessel or attempt to seize it back from the pirates. The honest truth was that he could do nothing of any practical use. It was a galling moment. There we were, the Merlin hovering above the pirated vessel, Northumberland a handful of miles away. All that military hardware primed and ready to do its job. But in the final analysis it was worthless.
The MV Saldanha had just been pirated from right under our very noses. It was on its way to a known pirate haven and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it.
The frustration was tangible, not just for the Marines, who had the pirates in their sights, would have liked to have taken a shot and attempted to seize the vessel, but whose hands were tied; but also for the crew as a whole. To avoid any danger to the crew, Commander Simpson ordered the Merlin to RTB immediately. The helicopter swerved.
‘How you feeling?’ I asked the pilot.
‘I’m pissed off.’
‘How frustrating is that?’
‘Fucking frustrating.’
‘Roger that.’
All I could do was agree with them as the crew of Northumberland watched the pirated Saldanha sail right past them, headed for the coast of Somalia.
And what of the crew of the merchant vessel? What could they expect? I could only imagine how terrified they must be. The pirates that were now swarming over their ship would be heavily armed. But in fact bloodshed would be a worst-case scenario for the pirates just as much as for the crew. They knew that as soon as they started killing or even hurting their hostages, they could expect military reprisals. Take care of them and, as they had seen time and again, they’d be given an easy ride: coalition warships would avoid boarding them in order to maintain the bloodless status quo. Moreover, the crew was the pirates’ collateral. Their bargaining chips. As the Saldanha slipped away into the distance, I recalled the conversation I’d had before I left with the spook whose business took him into Somalia. He had explained to me that the pirates would go out of their way to protect their assets. ‘If you had a car that you wanted to sell, would you go around and smash it up? No, you’d look after it – you’d clean it, you’d make sure the engine was OK, make sure it had oil and water.’
Once the Saldanha reached land, the pirates would make some attempt to ensure the hostages were comfortable. They have set themselves up to provide Western food in Eyl, and while the hostages would hardly be living in the lap of luxury, they could at least expect to be kept in reasonable health. That said, every part of Somalia is dangerous and unpredictable. The pirates might want to protect their assets, but that didn’t mean their safety was assured. Not by any means. I wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of those hostages, no matter how much pizza and Coke my captors fed me.
Saldanha did finally make it to port and, thanks to the restraint of Commander Simpson and the Marines, without anyone getting hurt. The vessel remained there for two months, supported by the infrastructure of the pirate town. It later transpired that the lead pirate went by the name of Abdirashid Ahmed. His nickname was Juqraafi – ‘Geography’. Several weeks after his escapades in the Gulf of Aden, our geographical mastermind reportedly took receipt of a ransom of $1.3 million before releasing the ship and its hostages unharmed. Not a bad fee for a few minutes’ work. His original demand was for $17 million, but Juqraafi claimed that he lowered it when it became clear that the negotiations would otherwise drag on too long. This extended period of negotiation is completely normal: as soon as the pirated ships hit land, the ransom demand bec
omes like any other business transaction, with one side trying to keep the price up, the other doing what they can to lower it. Once the deal is done, the money can be delivered by a variety of methods.
It is believed that until recently pirates’ ransoms have been transferred using an informal Islamic system called hawala. This system has its origins in Islamic law and has been around since at least the eighth century. It relies on a network of brokers. If a customer wishes to transfer money to somebody in another city, they give the money to one of these brokers, along with the details of the person to whom it is to be sent. The broker will contact another hawala broker in the recipient’s city, instruct them to make the payment and then will settle the debt at a later date. Nowadays such a payment can be completed within 24 hours.
It’s a simple system, but one based entirely on trust. If a sender loses his or her money, they don’t have a legal leg to stand on. Moreover, hawala operates entirely outside the international banking system. And it’s huge. According to the United Nations, somewhere between $100 billion and $300 billion is transferred through the system each year. Of this, around $15 billion enters India, $7 billion enters Pakistan, and just under a billion goes into Somalia.
Hawala is popular for a number of reasons. It’s cheaper than using a bank, for a start – hawala brokers charge a much smaller percentage than their bank counterparts. Their exchange rates are often better and, most importantly, hawala brokers don’t ask any questions. They also don’t keep detailed records of individual transactions, just a running total of the amount owed by one broker to another. It’s easy to use the hawala system to make anonymous payments that are difficult to trace. Pay someone by hawala and there’s no paper trail. As such, it has often been used to finance terrorism and other illegal activites – after the 11 September attacks the United States urged greater regulations of hawala operators.
It is thought that some pirates in Puntland purchase weapons by sending money via hawala to dealers in Mogadishu. It also seems likely, as there are no banks or Western Union offices that can transfer money in and out of Somalia, that the system has been used in some instances to arrange payment of pirates’ ransoms. But it is reported that the ransoms eventually grew too big for even the hawala system to cope with. Rumours now abound – unsubstantiated, it should be said – that teams of ex-special forces personnel are sometimes engaged to perform a cash dump onto the deck of the ship in question. I’ve also been told that money is simply transferred from one bank account to another in, for example, the City of London. That made me wonder just who was behind these operations, and it made me realize that the people committing these acts of piracy are nothing if not savvy.
Juqraafi the pirate has gone on record as saying that the pirates have well-organized systems for divvying up the loot. They generally have a ‘financier’ who sponsors them – he gets 30 per cent. The pirates themselves get 50 per cent. The remaining 20 per cent is divided out among the community and those who have helped the pirates on shore in some way – including corrupt officials who expect bribes whenever a ship is successfully taken.
How true pirates’ claims of Robin Hood-like generosity are, it’s impossible to say. They certainly have support among particular sections of the population, but in a part of the world that remains grindingly poor there seems little doubt that the people who benefit the most from these crimes are the pirates themselves and the Mr Bigs that support them.
Back on HMS Northumberland, none of us knew how long the Saldanha would remain in port, or whether the crew would come to any harm in the lawless town of Eyl. There wasn’t a man or woman on our ship that didn’t feel the frustration keenly. There was nothing anybody could do about the pirated vessel itself, but we knew that the pirates had to have gained access to the merchant ship somehow, and there had been no sign of any skiffs attached to the Saldanha. So it was that Merlin set off once again. Its mission this time was to scour the seas for a mother ship or any skiffs floating in the vicinity.
It didn’t take long for the Merlin to pick up a faint echo on the radar in the area of ocean where the Saldanha was pirated. The Fleet Protection Group immediately manned the RIBs and I joined them as they sped through the waves on the bearing the helicopter had indicated. The Marines expected it to be a skiff, and they weren’t disappointed: within minutes, we came across a long, solitary vessel, floating innocuously. We approached with caution, not knowing if the skiff was booby-trapped, and as Captain Andy Morris and Sergeant Macaffer gingerly boarded the empty vessel, that caution doubled. It would only take a primed hand grenade sitting under an RPG and suddenly we’d be swimming with the fishes.
The skiff was battered, old and very far from glamorous, but it contained everything necessary to carry out an act of piracy. Two Yamaha outboard motors – big enough to allow the vessel to catch up with a merchant ship – and plenty of canisters of fuel to power them, plus a 12-foot ladder, long enough to board most low-freeboard vessels. In addition, the Marines found plenty of items on board which suggested that the pirates hadn’t wanted to lose this skiff. There were wrapped-up wads of Somali cash – too much for any fisherman. There were clothes and shoes – the pirates must have boarded barefoot, but in poor countries like Somalia shoes are important, so they definitely wouldn’t have left them there on purpose. We found two RPG warheads, but no launcher. You wouldn’t have the warheads without the launcher, which meant they must have boarded with it; and they wouldn’t have boarded with a launcher and no warhead – they probably had several with them. There were shell casings from an AK-47 lying in the hull of the boat. It was impossible to say when they had been fired; all we knew was that they had been fired, and that the pirates were more than likely armed with assault rifles. There was the obligatory camel meat, and a large bunch of a green plant that looked a bit like basil. This was khat, an amphetamine-like stimulant indigenous to East Africa and the Arabian peninsula. It’s illegal in Somalia but widely available, and it’s said to be a particular favourite of the pirates. Khat keeps you awake, suppresses your appetite and gives you an addictive high. Some people chew the leaves, others the stalk, mashing it to a paste in their mouth which they keep there for a long time, sucking out all the juices before spitting it out again when it’s served its purpose.
We also found an expensive sea compass that they wouldn’t have wanted to lose and, bizarrely, a blue strap with the word ‘Arsenal’ embroidered on it. Clearly our men liked the Gunners as well as their guns. Our suspicions that the skiff had been lost rather than abandoned were confirmed when the Marines located, tied to the end of the boat, a frayed piece of rope that had clearly once been attached to something but had then snapped. It was impossible to ascertain how many people had been on this skiff and subsequently boarded the Saldanha; indeed, there might well have been two skiffs, with the second speeding back to some mother ship nearby, ready to go shopping again if a suitable target crossed its path. All we could say for sure was that this skiff had once been tied to something – most probably the merchant vessel itself – and that it belonged not to fishermen, but to pirates.
Captain Andy Morris jettisoned the RPG warheads over the side of the skiff. They sank without trace and it was good to know that, submerged in 2,500 feet of water, they were now harmless. But an unmanned floating skiff remained a hazard to navigation, so back on the bridge of HMS Northumberland the captain received permission to destroy the vessel. It was up to the Marines to bring the skiff within range of the frigate’s guns, so they attached a rope and used their RIBs to bring it in. I made the return journey in the skiff. In fact, I insisted on it. I might have missed out on meeting a pirate, but I wanted at least to ride in his boat.
Once the Marines and I were safely back on board Northumberland, the skiff was set adrift. But it wouldn’t sail for long. Already the ship’s gunners had it in their sights, and as soon as the skiff was a safe distance away, one of them opened up with a Minigun, a multi-barrel machine gun that fires 7.62 mm rounds at a rate o
f over 3,000 a minute. The ocean around the skiff was peppered with little explosions, and as the rounds slammed into the skiff itself, the fuel canisters ignited and it burst into flame. A thick black plume of smoke billowed up from it, and still the rounds from the Minigun came, the noise from the weapon thundering into the air around us. The skiff still wasn’t sinking, so the captain ordered the larger 30 mm Oerlikon guns on it.
It took a lot of firepower to sink that skiff. More than I would have expected. Or maybe the gunner was just taking out his frustrations on that tiny vessel, a lone symbol of the opportunity Northumberland had just narrowly missed to do what it had been put in the Gulf of Aden to do and catch a team of pirates. I wouldn’t have blamed him. As the skiff burned and sank, all we could do was reflect on the fact that combating piracy off the coast of Somalia is a bit like finding a needle in a haystack. If you’re not in the right place at the right time, you simply don’t stand a chance.
Our time on board the Royal Navy frigate was coming to a close. HMS Northumberland was on a bearing towards the port of Djibouti, and it was here that we were to disembark. Djibouti is a tiny country on the northern border of Somalia: a population of half a million, a fifth of whom live below the poverty line. Like Somalia, it has come through a period of civil war, but Djibouti, at least, has a functioning government. It’s not exactly a safe haven, but in this part of the world all things are relative, and it’s a hell of a sight safer than Eyl, where at that moment the MV Saldanha was taking its place alongside 16 other pirated vessels. In addition to its crew, there were also 292 other hostages in that pirate haven.
It was disappointing that during my time on board Northumberland we had not managed to catch up with a pirate. I’d learned a lot about the difficulties the British navy and others face in their struggle against this seaborne menace. I’d seen at first hand just how hard it is to catch pirates, and witnessed the frustration of the men and women of the Royal Navy at how little they could do. At the same time, I could understand how careful the coalition warships in the Gulf of Aden have to be. Just a couple of months previously an Indian frigate by the name of INS Tabar had destroyed a deep-sea trawler which they claimed was a pirate arsenal, full to the brim with supplies of weapons and ammo. Unfortunately, they were wrong. It was in fact a Thai fishing boat that had been hijacked, which still contained the entire crew, tied up below decks. Only one of them was ever found alive. A cautionary tale of the dangers involved in using your superior military strength. Later in my investigation I met a group of former Marines and Paras. Ordinarily, they would be plying their trade as private security guards in hot spots like Iraq, but they explained to me that their livelihoods had been taken by younger lads prepared to do the same job for a lot less money. And so they had diversified, offering themselves up to merchant vessels who wanted a bit of extra insurance. These guys weren’t allowed to take any weapons on board ship with them, so they had to make do with whatever they might find on a merchant vessel – fire extinguishers, hammers and the wherewithal to make Molotov cocktails. Their hands were tied, but maybe it was for the best, as later events in the Gulf of Aden would demonstrate the human cost of taking the fight to the pirates with genuine weapons.
