He insists that Malaysia is capable of ensuring the security of shipping on its side of the strait, although officials acknowledge that Indonesian waters are not so well patrolled and remain a dangerous haunt of pirates.
Muda says he has had no direct approach from the US on the issue of joint patrols, but the Asian Wall Street Journal reported last month that the US was pressing for tighter security in the strait.
The paper quoted a yet-to-be published report by the East-West Center, a US government think tank, as saying: "The nightmare for the United States is that a supertanker will be hijacked and driven into Singapore port, or some other large port, or sunk in the Malacca Strait thus seriously disrupting the flow of oil to East Asia, and potentially blocking US naval mobility and flexibility as well."
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad was invited to the White House last year to be thanked personally by US President George W. Bush for his support in the war on terrorism, including the detention of some 70 Islamic militants, many of them alleged JI members.
But relations between the two countries have soured recently over Mahathir's strong criticism of the war on Iraq, and earlier this month Malaysia announced that it had dropped Washington as a full partner in a new regional anti-terrorism center established here.
Despite his confidence that Malaysia can handle security alone, Muda acknowledges the threat from al-Qaeda, saying the discovery of the video tapes was "very interesting, it shows that they are watching us."
He says that if a tanker were hijacked, the marine police would call in a "Crisis Management Team" of specially trained sea- and air-borne anti-terrorism specialists.
Traffic in the strait also faces the threat of direct suicide attacks using small boats laden with explosives, such as those carried out against the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000 and against the Limburg oil tanker off Yemen last year.
That type of attack could be launched from hundreds of hide-aways on the jungle-clad coasts, and Tharamadurai concedes that it could be almost impossible to prevent in waters full of small craft, from Indonesian cargo junks to fishing boats.
He has a swivel-mounted 20mm cannon in the bow of the PX-27 and says he could "take them out if we knew what they were up to," but if a speedboat-bomb suddenly swerved into a tanker, "there's not much we could do."
With this concern always in the back of his mind, he goes about his daily task of intercepting and boarding beautiful but down-at-heel cargo junks, his sub-machine-gun-toting crew of 16 giving them a quick once over before sending them on their way.
The black smoke belching from their antiquated diesel engines drifts over the choppy waters, obscuring for a moment the modern symbols of wealth and power whose vulnerability as they sail line astern through the strait keeps the men in suits in New York and Tokyo awake at night.
RSS