A regional maritime official confirmed on Friday that an Egyptian cargo ship which was hijacked in the Gulf of Aden near Somalia has 25 crew on board.
Andrew Mwangura, the coordinator of the East Africa Seafarers Assistance Program (SAP) said the Mansourah vessel was hijacked late on Wednesday, making it the 10th vessel to be hijacked in the pirate-infested waters of Somalia since last month.
"The Egyptian Mansourah was hijacked late Wednesday with 25 crew members, all Egyptians. The hijack occurred on the same day that a French vessel was seized in the area," Mwangura told Xinhua by telephone from Mombasa.
The maritime official said the yacht was sailing towards Eyl, a former fishing region that is now a base for the pirates who have been staging the attacks against foreign vessels.
Piracy has surged this year in the Gulf of Aden, part of an important shipping route from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal.
The latest attack came as UN Special Representative for Somalia Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah called for international action to combat a surge in piracy in the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia.
"This piracy is increasingly a threat to international navigation and free trade in an already fragile environment. The millions of dollars in ransom paid to the pirates and their associates inland and overseas has become a multi-million dollar business which threatens stability in Puntland and in Somalia as a whole," said Ould-Abdallah.
Somalia's transitional federal government, which has no navy and is embroiled in combating a bloody insurgency, has been unable to control the pirates.
At least 10 ships are believed to be in the hands of pirates at the moment, with four of them being seized within a 24-hour period.
Mwangura said more than 30 ships have been attacked this year, most of them off the coast of Somalia's Puntland, making that stretch of the coastline one of the most dangerous in the world.
Mwangura said currently the Somali gunmen are holding captive184 crew members of 9 ocean-going vessels
The UN Security Council in June approved incursions into Somali waters to combat the pirates, and while Ould-Abdallah welcomed this move by saying that it is time for a "collaborative effort to put the resolution into effect."
Malaysia on Friday said it was sending three warships to the Gulf of Aden after two of its ships were hijacked with the loss of one life.
A spate of hijackings by pirates off the coast of Somalia has triggered the deployment of a multi-coalition naval force to patrol the world's most dangerous waters.
The U.S. Navy said Western coalition warships and aircraft will conduct patrols to boost security in the Gulf of Aden after pirates hijacked a German ship off Somalia's coast.
The Horn of Africa nation's coastline is considered one of the world's most dangerous stretches of water because of piracy.
Somalia is at the entrance to the Gulf of Aden, which leads to the Red Sea and the 166-kilometer Suez Canal, one of the world's most important shipping channels.
The country has been plagued by factional fighting between warlords and hasn't had a functioning central administration since the 1991 ouster of former dictator Mohammed Siad Barre.
Source:Xinhua
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