Aboard a dingy and a helicopter, Swedish special forces head out from the warship Carlskrona to search for Somali pirates, but while the EU Naval Force is more actively hunting pirates than ever before on the high seas, their financiers and organizers remain out of reach on land.
Officials complain that not enough is being done to gather intelligence on them and their assets, even as law enforcement agencies cite problems with coordinating the collection of information and legal barriers in sharing it.
As piracy off East Africa continues unabated — with 84 ships attacked this year as of early this month and 24 of them seized — frustration is growing in the shipping industry.
Per Gullestrup, chief executive of Denmark’s Clipper Group, says it has a wealth of information that is not being used or collected by anti-piracy forces. Clipper Group is believed to be the first company to use European courts to file blackmail and extortion charges against pirates.
“We have DNA evidence, records of phone calls, the serial numbers from the notes we delivered in ransom ... but there is no centralized effort to collect information,” Gullestrup said.
Some companies have photos of pirates’ faces, he added, but no one had asked for the information.
Pierre St Hilaire from Interpol’s anti-piracy task force said it must wait for national police forces to volunteer information which could then be included in an album containing photos of nearly 200 individuals and fingerprints for about half. The album is designed for navies who stop and search suspected pirate vessels, but not everyone has access to the album, partly because Interpol must get permission from each member state that supplied the information to share it, St Hilaire said.
In the meantime, there is currently no reliable way to check if men stopped and searched on the high seas are wanted for a previous hijacking, the commander of the EU Naval Force said.
“Ships will often see men on board skiffs throwing ladders and weapons overboard as we approach to board and search them,” Rear Admiral Jan Thornqvist said in an interview aboard the warship Carlskrona last month. “In the ideal world, we could run these through a database and see if any of the men was wanted for anything.”
The EU naval force has begun trying to gather some evidence when it stops suspected pirates, but so far it is mostly limited to photographs and fingerprints of the men at sea, said Jens Lindstrom, the EU force’s legal expert.
“Militaries are trained to win wars, not trials,” Lindstrom said. “At the moment, there’s very little risk for the pirates once the ransom has been paid.”
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