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WASHINGTON, January 15,
2009 – The U.S. Navy plans an aggressive effort to capture pirates off
the coast of Somalia with the aid of a country in the region that would
agree to prosecute and hold them, a naval commander said on Thursday.
U.S. Navy Vice Adm. William Gortney, commander of the U.S. 5th Fleet,
said the United States is nearing a deal with an unidentified country
that would agree to take the pirates into custody once captured by U.S.
forces in Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden waters off the Horn of Africa.
Up to now, U.S. forces in the region have limited their operations to
deterrence and disruption because no country including the United States
has been willing to hold the pirates.
"The State Department is close on finalizing an agreement," said Gortney,
who declined to identify the other country involved.
"We're expecting it ... this week, next week. But we're very close," he
told reporters at the Pentagon.
"We are going to aggressively go after pirates," he told reporters at
the Pentagon. "It's going to be a mixture of surveillance and then rapid
action once we observe them."
Pirates pose a growing threat to shipping off the African coast, forcing
insurance prices to rise and bringing naval vessels from an
unprecedented 14 countries including China, India and Russia to protect
shipping.
But the threat continues to grow. Gortney said about a dozen attempted
boardings have occurred in early January, a number about equal to the
monthly averages of the last quarter of 2008.
Four boardings have proved successful in the past six weeks, bringing to
11 the number of vessels held by pirates and to 210 the crew members as
hostages, he said.
The admiral blamed an upswing in pirating since August on a tribe in
northern Somalia. But he said there was no evidence to link the
tribesmen to Islamist terrorism.
"It's all about the money," he said. "They're fishermen and we have to
get them back to fishing."
Gortney said his expected capture orders would require the U.S. Navy to
monitor pirate boardings and positively identify individual pirates who
could then be tracked and captured.
Suspects found at sea with "pirate paraphernalia" such as AK-47 assault
rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and ladders could also be taken into
custody. The Navy currently confiscates such materiel but allows the
suspects to go free.
Source: Reuters
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