Interview: Insight into Piracy

Trends in piracy in 2014.

Interview: Insight into Piracy

2014 has been a pretty eventful year with respect to pirate activities, seeing a tragic end with a crew member of a Vietnamese tanker VP Asphalt 2 being killed in a hijacking attack off the eastern coast of Malaysia in December.

On the other hand, pirate suspects being taken before European courts were given compensation for not being presented “promptly” before a judge resulting in human rights violation.

All in all, media reports on pirate related stories stirred up the public opinion from the offset and throughout.

As we wanted to learn about the hottest piracy spots with major incidents in 2014 along with trends and tactics adopted by pirates, World Maritime News spoke with Mr Mike Edey, Head of Intelligence at Dryad Maritime, UK’s leading maritime intelligence provider to find out more.

WMN: Recently you said that a pattern in piracy incidents in South East (SE) Asia is emerging, which may indicate that hijackers are well informed of tanker movements, maybe even too well. Have you acquired any new data?

Edey: The small tankers that are being taken all sailed from Singapore. The same company has been targeted on a couple of occasions, for example the Oarpin 2 & 4 both belonging to Thai Petroleum Tankers Company Ltd.

Recently, we have seen evidence that the pirates have incorrectly targeted tankers carrying bitumen or other types of oil. VP Asphalt 2 on December 6th 2014 and New Glory on May 25th 2014 both had bitumen but also Sri Kandi 151 had a cargo of palm oil. Thai authorities later recovered the ship with the cargo intact and detained eight personnel.

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Source: worldmaritimenews.com