Quotes of the Day

Sellathurai Mahalingam was standing on the bridge of the M.V. Semlow watching night settle upon the Indian Ocean when he first realized he and his crew were in trouble. The waters off East Africa were unseasonably flat and the Semlow, loaded with 850 tons of rice, food aid for victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami in Somalia, was cutting its way north at a steady 12 knots, some 55 km from the Somali coast. Then, out of the dark, came a burst of gunfire. "I saw the flash of five to 10 shots," says Mahalingam, 58, a short Sri Lankan man with a gray beard and 20 years' experience on the high seas. "Straight away I knew it must be pirates."

Mahalingam alerted his chief officer, and turned the ship to starboard. But before he could issue a distress signal, three fiberglass speedboats with powerful outboard motors had pulled alongside the Semlow, a 58-m cargo boat often chartered by the U.N. World Food Program (WFP) to ship aid to Africa's neediest. The pirates hooked a small metal ladder to the ship and scrambled aboard. "There were 15 to 20 men wearing shorts and T shirts," remembers Mahalingam. The boarders were barefoot but carrying pistols, AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. The pirates rushed to the bridge where, in halting English, they demanded to see the captain; they quizzed Mahalingam and his nine-man crew—eight Kenyans and a Tanzanian—about their religion and told them they were being taken hostage. "The pirates were very calm," says Mahalingam. "They told me this was the 20th ship they had hijacked this year."

They probably weren't exaggerating. The waters off Somalia are right now some of the most dangerous in the world for sailors. Somalia's pirates used to be small fish compared to the bandits who strike in Asia's Malacca Straits and South China Sea. But over the past seven months, Somali pirates have attacked 25 vessels, including the Semlow in June, another ship carrying food aid in September, a Maltese-registered cargo ship carrying 15 tons of iron ore, and, just last weekend, a cruise ship with some 300 American and British holidaymakers aboard. (Though the pirates fired semiautomatic weapons and a rocket-propelled grenade, the ship's crew used an on-board "acoustic bang" to scare the pirates off, according to a spokeman for the liner.) Maritime authorities are worried not only that the number of attacks off Somalia has jumped from last year, when just two were reported, but that Somali pirates are becoming more aggressive and skillful. In the past, most of the attacks in the region were on fishing boats close to shore in the Gulf of Aden off northern Somalia. But over the past year or so pirates have moved south and have begun to strike at ships further out at sea. Until 2003, the International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Center in Kuala Lumpur recommended that ships stay at least 50 nautical miles from the Somali coast. Last year they increased that to 100 nautical miles and this year many shipping companies are telling their captains to stay at least 200 nautical miles offshore. "It is a very lucrative business and with no law enforcement in Somalia there's very little risk for the pirates," says Noel Choong, director of the Piracy Reporting Center. "The Somalia coast has become a pirates' paradise."

The surge in attacks comes fourteen years after the fall of Somalia's last effective central government. Much of the country is split between warlords, clan elders and Saudi-sponsored Islamic clerics. Peace talks in neighboring Kenya led, last year, to the election of a "transitional federal government." But that body is already split by a rivalry between the President and Prime Minister, on the one hand, who are holed up in the small town of Jowhar, and several warlords, some of whom are also cabinet ministers, based in Mogadishu. With no way of controlling his own ministers, let alone the bandits who wander Somalia's plains or the pirates that ply her seas, Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Gedi has asked for help to stop the piracy and monitor the country's coastline. "We cannot handle this issue as we have no marine forces," says a spokesman for the Prime Minister.

Somalia, which boasts the longest coastline in Africa, is no easy place to monitor. Combined Task Force 150, a joint naval unit that includes forces from the U.S., Germany, France and sometimes Britain and Italy, already patrols the Gulf of Aden and the waters around the Horn of Africa, searching for suspected terrorists who may be moving equipment or people by sea or planning a maritime attack. The reduced number of pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden is a "side effect of Operation Enduring Freedom," says Commander Dirk Gross at the German Defense Ministry in Berlin. Commander Jeff Breslau, a U.S. Navy spokesman in Bahrain, says that coalition forces will help ships in distress but that "the focus is not on piracy or maritime crime." The increased naval presence in the Gulf of Aden may have caused the escalation in attacks further south. Leo van der Velden, the WFP's deputy country director for Somalia, says that over the past few years, pirates from northern Somalia have begun training and working with bandits in central Somalia, which western forces patrol less regularly.

The fusion of northern technique and southern hardware seems to be paying dividends. Somali pirates now demand, and often receive, hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom, according to the Piracy Reporting Center's Choong. With that sort of money the pirates "can afford to buy themselves some pretty nice boats," says Choong, and hence extend the range of their seizures.

That's what happened with the Semlow. After taking control of the ship, the pirates stole $8,500 from Mahalingam's safe and ransacked the crew's cabins. Then they forced the crew to set a course towards the central Somali town of Ceel Huur, where the Semlow dropped anchor within sight of land. "I told the pirates that we were carrying cargo that belonged to all Somalians," says Mahalingam. "I said, 'This is for your own people. Why are you doing this?'"

Three days after the hijacking, he got his reply. A man arrived from the mainland with a note. It told Mahalingam to radio the Semlow's owners in Mombasa, Kenya, and give them two telephone numbers: one for a mobile phone, the other for a Thuraya satellite phone. Inayet Kudrati, 54, director of the Motaku Shipping Agency, which has had three of its four boats hijacked by Somali pirates since June, received the call and was eventually told he should pay $500,000 if he wanted the ship and crew back. "I told them I didn't have that kind of money," says Kudrati.

Diplomats from Kenya, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and the U.N. took over negotiations. A delegation flew to Somalia to talk to the transitional government and clan elders, warning that food aid could be halted unless the Semlow's crew was released. Meanwhile, life on board the ship fell into a pattern. The crew was forced to stay at the rear of the Semlow where they passed the time fishing and praying. Food quickly ran low and the crew rationed water. The pirates ate well, though, bringing goats, potatoes, tomatoes and onions from the mainland and cooking WFP rice. Every four or five days a fresh group of pirates would arrive to relieve their colleagues. On board, they passed the time cleaning their weapons, marching in haphazard formation on the deck, and chewing miraa, a mildly narcotic leaf popular in Somalia. They shot at any boats that came too close. One day an associate came from the mainland with a note that said, "the Somali Navy has captured your vessel."

By September, negotiations to obtain the crew's release had foundered. The hijackers had increased their ransom demand and reneged on an agreement to allow the rice to be handed over to the Somali government. When the Semlow's generator ran out of oil, the pirates accused the crew of hoarding it. One Somali fired a shot through the window on the bridge. "We thought this trip was the end of our lives," remembered able seaman Rashid Juma Mwatuga, 42. In late September the Ibn Batuta, an Egyptian ship carrying cement, appeared on the horizon. "The pirates told me they were going to hijack this passing ship," says Mahalingam. "What could I do?" The pirates jumped into their speedboats. Half an hour later the Egyptian ship's captain radioed the Semlow to say that he had been captured too. The ships sailed together towards Harardhere, 400 km up the coast from Mogadishu. There, Mahalingam and his chief engineer were taken ashore and were driven 50 km inland, where they met the pirate bosses. "At that stage I realized that all the coastal villages were involved," says Mahalingam.

The captain was given back a purse containing letters from his wife, and was told he could fly home soon. When he phoned his sister in Sri Lanka, he broke down. "I told her I was safe but did not know when I was coming home," says Mahalingam. He and the chief engineer were taken back to the ship. A few days later, the pirates gathered their weapons, piled into their speedboats, and abandoned both the Semlow and the Ibn Batuta. The WFP denies paying any ransom—"It would set a bad precedent," said a WFP spokesman—but the Motaku Shipping Agency's Kudrati told TIME that he had handed over $135,000. "In the end we had to give in to them," he says.

That afternoon, says Mahalingam, a small boat flying a white flag approached. Somali negotiators had sent it to escort the Semlow to a Somali port where it could offload the rice it was still carrying. Mahalingam, who a fortnight ago finally made it back to Mombasa, four months after first setting out, and is now home in Sri Lanka, radioed the Torgelow, a sister ship that was carrying tea and coffee for Somali traders as well as food and oil for the Semlow. But instead of hearing the captain's voice on the radio, Mahalingam heard a familiar Somali accent. The pirates had their next catch.

• Simon Robinson with Xan Rice | Mombasa
• The waters off Somalia are infested with pirates—and things are getting worse