Somalian pirates: are they acting alone?

A piece of recent Yahoo news stated that �In 2008, there were 111 incidents including 42 vessels hijacked. So far in 2009, there have been 114 attempted attacks but only 29 have resulted in hijacking�, and that �Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi announced on Saturday that the problem would be on the agenda at a G-8 summit in Italy in July.�

Quite interesting, yeah? Piracy is on the obvious rise. In the world with guided smart missiles and other weaponry, with satellites and other contemporary technology watching day and night, for example, all the Caribbean basin in a battle with drugs trafficking, can you imagine some small boats with 3-5 untrained often very young men approaching huge international vessels and taking them as hostages? Is it really so easy to take hostage a big ship, so that the success rate reaches such impressive numbers?!

Or is it something untold behind this?

The fact that quite often the pirates get the �right ships� raises tough questions. For example, when an Ukrainian vessel full of arms has been highjacked there was a short piece of comments that actually the pirates knew in advance about that ship, having received prior information from the Ukrainian port of dispatch. Add the multimillion ransom to this and adapted strategies in hunting the ships, and one would have some serious doubts about absence of structure and organization of piracy.

Then another one: when negotiating the ransom, it would be interesting to know who is talking to whom? Do these pirates have official representatives?

On the other side, the recent successful liberation by the US Navy Seals of an American ship captain held captive for several days by the pirates, proves that this crime phenomena can be fought, especially when there is desire and when done by professionals. 10-15 such well coordinated operations and the damage to the pirates may become irrecoverable, whereas the warning message to those who stand behind those poor kids-corsairs would be quite clear.

In these circumstances I wonder what would G-8 decide about it?