Pirate attacks off lawless Somalia are becoming less successful thanks to international policing efforts, but there is no immediate end in sight to "the scourge", NATO and EU officials said Wednesday.
"We have seen a substantial reduction of success rate in pirates's attacks," said British Vice-Admiral Philip Jones, operational commander of the European naval force Atalanta battling the high-seas criminals who hijack ships for ransom.
The international, including NATO, efforts to thwart the pirates have been helped by the onset of the monsoon season, he said.
NATO spokesman James Appathurai agreed that seajackings were down, but stressed that the total number of pirate attacks was still increasing, it's just their effectiveness which is dropping off.
"We have seen a significant increase in the number of attacks but a decrease in the effectiveness of those attacks," he said.
Those sentiments are backed up by figures from the International Maritime Bureau's (IMB) Piracy Reporting Centre which reported Tuesday that the total number of pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden and off the east coast of Somalia this year have already overtaken the figure for all of 2008.
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 hijackings, the IMB said.
Naval ships from the European Union, NATO and other US-led coalitions have thwarted several attacks in recent days, either preventing hijackings or capturing suspected pirates.
Some 20 foreign warships patrol the waters off the coast of Somalia -- on one of the globe's busiest maritime trade routes -- on any given day.
But the area is huge and pirates have adapted their tactics to hunt for vessels several hundred nautical miles into the Indian Ocean, further away from the heavily-patrolled shipping corridors of the Gulf of Aden.
Jones said that Atalanta had in recent weeks captured four of the pirates' main "mother ships," from which they launch raids in smaller faster craft.
However he warned that "the scourge of piracy will not be overcome overnight."
"We don't have enough ships to escort every individual ship... We need literally hundred of warships but we make a difference," he added.
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.
Source: AFP
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