Treasure Ship

It's a scene out of another century. On Tuesday night an Indian Navy vessel in the Gulf of Aden approached a ship thought to be manned by pirates operating from lawless Somalia. Although it was dark, Indian officers told news-agency reporters that they could see crew members on deck brandishing guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Volleys were fired, fire broke out on one of the pirate ships, and it sank. The crew escaped in a speed boat, the Navy ship in hot pursuit.

Banks and automakers might be in a tailspin, but piracy is one industry that's still thriving. So far this year, pirates operating off the coast of Somalia have successfully hijacked 36 vessels. Navies from around the world have descended on the troubled waters around the Horn of Africa to try to restore order, but they seem only to have emboldened the pirates. Last weekend they took their most audacious prize yet: the Sirius Star, a Saudi supertanker carrying $100 million worth of oil. It remains moored in plain view off the Somali coast as the owners, Vela International, a subsidiary of Aramco, await ransom demands. NEWSWEEK's Barrett Sheridan spoke with Peter Lehr, a lecturer in terrorism studies at Scotland's University of St. Andrews and an expert on Indian Ocean piracy, about the fate of the Sirius Star and Somalia's darkened waters. Excerpts:

What will happen next to the Sirius Star?
The pirates will start negotiations with a demand for an outrageously high amount of money. If you take a look at the MV Faina [a hijacked Ukrainian ship carrying 33 Soviet-made tanks], the pirates originally demanded $35 million. That was at the end of September, and they're now down to $8 million, which is still quite a hefty amount for such a ship—the usual ransom amount is $2 million. For the Sirius Star I think they will try to get as much out of it as possible. However, the ship is quite dangerous for them. It's far too big. Navigational errors could happen, and you could have a disastrous oil spill damaging the whole coast of Somalia with the 2 million barrels aboard. I'm not really sure that the pirates were well advised to attack such a huge ship.

So they may be eager to have it taken off their hands.
Yes, could be. It was a very audacious raid—450 nautical miles off the coast of Kenya! That's amazing. So they will start by demanding, say, $50 million or something like that. Negotiations will take probably weeks, I think. The MV Faina has been in the hands of pirates since the end of September. That's now seven weeks. So it can be a protracted affair.

And how do these negotiations work? Who's doing the negotiating?
You first establish a link with the pirates, and then you have some go-betweens to ensure that the money will flow. It's a difficult procedure. They never meet in person. If the money is handed over, it's usually by an ex-military member, usually someone from Special Forces. Or it's paid into an offshore bank, although many banks don't like to touch this money anymore. It's now too high-profile, too hot. In recent cases, the money was paid in cash—U.S. dollars, usually.

The Sirius Star is a huge ship and can't be hidden. Where do they take the ship?
Most of the hijacked ships are at anchor off the port of Eyl in the Puntland region of Somalia, near the Horn of Africa. They are basically in the public eye—everybody can see the ships there, and they're usually shadowed by warships. The pirates know very well that there is nothing that the warships can do.