At the height of the Somali pirate crisis in 2011, 151 vessels were attacked in one of the world’s busiest shipping routes. Thousands of hostages were taken and billions of dollars were lost in ransom, damage and delayed shipments.
An unprecedented international response saw the dispatch of over two dozen vessels from the EU, the U.S., China, Russia, India and Japan, which succeeded in reducing the number of attacks down to only 17 in 2015, mainly involving smaller fishing vessels.
However, last month, dozens of armed men in two small skiffs captured the Aris 13, an oil tanker flying the flag of Comoros, and escorted it to be ransomed in the semi-autonomous northern Somalian region of Puntland. The vessel was attempting to pass through the Socotra Gap, a route between Ethiopia and the Yemeni island of Socotra, when it was boarded by pirates. The route is often used by vessels as a shortcut to save time and money, but has been identified as a high-risk area by anti-piracy groups. According to reports, the Aris 13 was “low, slow and too close to the coast”, making it an easy target for armed attackers.
The Aris 13 was the first large commercial vessel to be captured since 2012, when the Greek-owned MV Smyrni, carrying 26 crew and 135,000 tones of crude oil, was held in a pirate anchorage for 10 months before being released for an undisclosed ransom.