Looks like they are just going to ransom them. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/readon.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":mm" border="0" alt="readon.gif" />
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--><b>Pirates Seek $35 Million for Ship</b>
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: September 27, 2008
NAIROBI, Kenya — Somali pirates in a hijacked ship carrying more than 30 battle tanks were steaming toward a notorious pirate den on Saturday, and they vowed not to release the ship until a $35 million ransom was paid, Somali and Kenyan officials said. According to Mohamed Osman Aden, a Somali diplomat in Kenya, the Ukrainian-owned vessel was headed to Xarardheere, on the barren Somali coast. Xarardheere is an isolated fishing village that has thrived on organized crime and has frequently been used as a pirate hide-out.
Mr. Mohamed said that while the cargo in this case was extremely unusual — 33 Soviet-designed T-72 tanks and a large supply of ammunition and grenade launchers, all intended for the Kenyan military — the tactics were pretty typical.
“These guys just want the money,†he said.
He predicted that the pirates would reduce their ransom demand to $1 million to $2 million, though Ukrainian officials have not said whether they will pay any ransom at all.
The Kenyan government said in a statement on Saturday that it “does not and will not negotiate with international criminals, pirates and terrorists and will endeavor to recover the hijacked ship and military cargo.â€
American warships in the Indian Ocean were closely tracking the ship, and a Russian frigate, the Dauntless, was on its way.
Diplomats in Kenya said Saturday that military operations involving several countries were being discussed but that the plan was to wait a few days before considering a strike.
The hijacked ship’s crew is mostly Ukrainian, and already worried family members have contacted the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry asking what they can do.
The hijacking occurred on Thursday evening when pirates in three speedboats attacked the Ukrainian cargo ship, the Faina, which was in Somali waters about 200 miles from shore, en route to Kenya.
On Friday, Kenyan and Ukrainian officials disclosed that the ship was loaded with 2,320 tons of weapons. Many diplomats in Kenya are concerned that the arms could fall into the hands of insurgents fighting Somalia’s transitional government and pitch war-torn Somalia deeper into chaos.
The pirates, however, are not expected to be able to do much with the T-72 tanks because each weighs more than 80,000 pounds. Western diplomats have said that the pirates do not have the special equipment or the skill to get the tanks ashore.
But the tanks — and the jitters they have caused — may be used for leverage to increase the ransom. Andrew Mwangura, program coordinator for the Seafarers’ Assistance Program in Kenya, which tracks pirate attacks, said that the pirates had demanded $35 million through intermediaries and that they were trying to contact the ship’s owners.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Rest of the story here :
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/world/africa/28pirates.html?hp" target="_blank">http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/world/af...pirates.html?hp</a>
Here is a little more detailed assesment
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--><b>Pirates call all the shots</b>
As Somali cargo ship hi-jackers dmand an £18m ransom after tanks and weapons are seized, Fred Bridgland reports on a deepening crisis
Comment
SOMALI PIRATES who seized a Ukrainian ship carrying 33 T72 battle tanks - apparantly bound for the autonomous government of South Sudan - yesterday warned against any attempt by Western navies to rescue the vessel's weapons cargo or its crew.
Januna Ali Jama, a spokesman for the pirates in the breakaway north statelet of Puntland said the pirates would soon begin the routine Somali pirate tactic of negotiating the return of the cargo ship Faina to its Ukraine state owners in exchange for a ransom.
Jama told the BBC Somali Service that the pirates demand is £18 million from the Kiev government because apart from the Russian made tanks the Faina is carrying "weapons of all kinds", including rocket-propelled grenades, anti-aircraft guns and many hundreds of thousands of ammunition.
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Warning France and the United States, which have warships in the area the Faina was seized - in the Gulf of Aden as it opens into the Indian Ocean - the pirate spokesman said: "Anything that happens is their responsibility."
He said the ship's crew initially fought against the pirate assault, but the attackers, estimated to have been about 100-strong, eventually succeeded in using "tactical manoeuvres" to overpower the crew.
An aide to the Faina's captain told a Moscow news service in a satellite call from the ship's bridge that the vessel is anchored offshore, as the pirates await answers to their ransom demand, and that none of the crew had been injured in the attack or subsequently harmed.
Justifying the attack, Jama said: "I do not think we are in the wrong. Our country is destroyed by foreigners who dump toxic waste at our shores."
Huge waves that battered Puntland after the Asian tsunami on Boxing Day 2004 killed 300 people, destroying thousands of homes and stirring up tonnes of nuclear and toxic wastes illegally dumped offshore in the 1990s.
The United Nations Environment Programme said the tsunami waves washed up rusting containers of toxic waste on the Puntland shoreline which broke up and scattered nuclear, chemical and medical waste inland. UNEP reported many unusual illnesses in the region following the tsunami. It said European companies were involved in the dumping trade, but because of the high levels of insecurity onshore and off the Somali coast, there was never any accurate assessment of the extent of the problem.
Abdullah Elmi Mohamed, a Somali academic studying in Sweden, said European companies charged "approximately $8 per tonne for dumping off Somalia, while in Europe the cost for the disposal and treatment of toxic waste material could go up to $1000 per tonne".
If scores of hijackings of large ships off the Somali coast this year are anything to go by, the Kiev government may have no choice other than to pay the ransom to free the Ukrainian, Russian and Latvian crew, including one 14-year-old boy, and to ensure that the controversial cargo reaches Juba, capital of South Sudan.
Thursday's hijacking of the Faina brings to 62 the number of attacks on large vessels off Somalia this year, and pirates are holding 15 ships and more than 300 crew members, said Noel Choong, who heads the International Maritime Bureau's piracy reporting centre based in Malaysia, another country plagued by high seas piracy.
An irony of the assault on the Faina by an estimated is that it came just as the Royal Canadian Navy frigate Ville de Québec had begun to withdraw from its protection duties further south in waters off the Republic of Somalia. The Canadian government immediately reversed the withdrawal order and its warship will remain in Somali waters until at least the beginning of November.
The Ville de Québec has been protecting merchant vessels ferrying South African-donated grain from the Kenyan port of Mombasa to Mogadishu, capital of the war-torn Republic of Somalia.
However, the pirate syndicates - of which there at least five, each about 1000-strong - operate out of Puntland, far to the north, wrapped around the Horn of Africa where the Gulf of Aden meets the Indian Ocean, which declared itself separate from the Republic of Somalia 10 years ago. Puntland is to Mogadishu what Kurdistan, semi-autonomous and far off in the northern mountains of Iraq, is to Baghdad.
Unrecognised internationally - although the British Embassy in neighbouring Ethiopia maintains close contact with the Puntland government, which is allowing oil exploration by three Western companies - little diplomatic pressure can be put on Puntland, which says piracy grew after international "sea robber" fishing fleets plundered and wrecked its rich fishing grounds. The United Nations estimates that fish worth at least £50 million a year are plundered illegally from Somali waters by Spanish and other foreign boats.
The pirates are unlikely to be unable to unload the tanks because of a lack of specialist heavy-lifting gear in the tiny ports and innumerable coves of Puntland, a barren land three times the area of Scotland which historically depended on fishing and camel and goat-herding.
But that will hardly discourage the pirates. What they want is booty, in the form of on-board cash, cargo and, most importantly, ransom money, which owners are increasingly willing to pay, given the huge values of ships and their cargoes and the daily costs of maintaining them at sea. On the same day as the Faina was captured, another Puntland pirate syndicate released a Japanese ship and its 21-member crew after a £1 million ransom was paid. The 53,000-tonne bulk carrier Stella Maris had a valuable cargo of zinc and lead ingots. And as the Stella Maris was being freed, Somali pirates were hijacking a Greek chemical tanker with 19 crew on board as it sailed through the Gulf of Aden from Europe to the Middle East.
The Faina is believed to be heading to the pirate port of Eyl, the main destination of hijacked ships where Puntland entrepreneurs run special restaurants for the hundreds of seized crewmen and where the pirates' accountants make calculations on laptops and drive state-of-the-art land cruisers.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Rest of the story here :
<a href="http://www.sundayherald.com/international/shinternational/display.var.2453784.0.0.php" target="_blank">http://www.sundayherald.com/international/...2453784.0.0.php</a>
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" border="0" alt="icon_mrgreen1.gif" /> It be lookin' dat dem Rooski's be a might bit PO'd from reading dis 'ere arktical! <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/pirate3.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="
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