A Nigerian court has completed its first ever convictions using the nation’s new anti-piracy law, and the defendents have been sentenced to a five-figure fine. There is a twist, however: according to Nigerian media, the accused are not pirates as traditionally conceived, but rather the local employees and managers of a global private security company.

Last month, nine individuals affiliated with the Lagos branch of a UK-based global security company were charged in connection with the boarding and maritime kidnapping incident aboard the ro/ro ferry Elobey VI. The men were accused of involvement in a criminal conspiracy that resulted in the abduction of three crewmembers from the vessel off Equatorial Guinea on March 21. The captives were released in mid-May after the payment of a $200,000 ransom.

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Source: maritime-executive.com

By Jakob Voight

On July 17, 2020, the tanker Curacao Trader was boarded by pirates at a position about 210 nautical miles from Nigerian shores. 13 Russian and Ukrainian seafarers were abducted. Two weeks before, the freighter Kota Budi was boarded about 200 nm from Nigerian shore. What is particularly noticeable about these attacks is the location: when looking at the statistics for 2019, it appears that the average distance of confirmed pirate attacks was 62 nm from shore, with only seven attacks at positions more than 100 nm from shore. In 2020, the average distance of confirmed pirate attacks was 75 nm, and there have already been several pirate attacks at positions more than 100 nm from shore.

Despite the improvement of the regional cooperation demonstrated in the response to the Hai Lu Feng 11 attack in May, despite the arrival of new maritime platforms, despite the use of surveillance systems like the Deep Blue project in Nigeria, it is obvious that pirates are a permanent threat off West Africa. The increase of pirates’ operational range is not a surprise for informed observers. This trend was seen in the Indian Ocean between 2004 and 2010, when Somali pirates reached almost to the west coast of India. This evolution is not due to chance – it’s simply the search for “soft locations,” areas where no means of coercion prevent the act of piracy or react quickly enough to intervene in a boarding or kidnapping. West African pirates thus demonstrate their capacity for adaptation.

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Source: maritime-executive.com