BOSASSO, Somalia (Reuters) - After a lull in business during the first months of 2009, Somalia’s increasingly brazen pirates expect to be back in the money with nearly half a dozen foreign vessels captured in the last week alone.
Towns acting as pirate bases along Somalia’s Indian Ocean coastline have come back to life, with locals rubbing their hands at a cash bonanza anticipated from ransoms.
“We can smell the cash near,” said Yassin Dheere, a former fisherman who has become a wealthy financier of piracy based in the coastal village of Eyl.
Shopkeeper Abdullahi Said said about 50 cars, belonging to pirates and their associates, had poured into the rocky settlement in the last few days.
“Eyl had been calm and lifeless, but now it is a city again. The population has grown and business is good,” he said.
The pirates earned dozens of millions of dollars in ransoms during their unprecedented capture of 42 vessels in 2008, splashing it on wives, houses, cars and fancy goods.
Though their attack on a U.S.-flagged freighter failed this week, yielding only the American captain as a hostage in a precarious standoff [ID:nLA236131], the pirate gangs have had a run of success elsewhere.
Just in the last week, they have taken a 20,000-tonne German container vessel, a Taiwan-registered fishing boat, a British-owned vessel, a French yacht and a Yemeni tug. Continued…
Permanent link to this post: Somali pirates “smell money” as good times return
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