Al Qaeda behind Red Sea piracy, official

The head of Yemeni National Security claims al-Qaeda is probably behind the increasingly common acts of piracy along the Somali coast and in the Arabian Sea.“We don’t exclude that al-Qaeda has found an appropriate environment in Somalia to carry out its terrorist acts especially after its call for its members last April to move the battle into the sea to control sea outlets,” said Ali Al Ansi, head of National Security, in a Tuesday press statement. Al-Ansi praised the efforts of his country’s coastguards for the steps they have taken to combat piracy.
Yemen has trained and deployed about 1200 soldiers as coastguards since 2002, when it established the Authority for Coast Guards with American and European support. “We still need a lot of support to face challenges like Al Qaeda, illegal immigrants, and illegal fishermen, etc,” Colonel Lutf Al-Barati, commander of the Coast Guards in the Gulf of Aden, told the Yemen Observer.“The pirates have become very powerful people with millions of dollars and a lot of equipment. They are not merely gangs, but rather they may actually control Somalia.” The Coast Guards commander said material and human resources are not enough to fight piracy. “We feel sad when we receive distress signals from ships which need our help, but we cannot do anything for them,” Al Barati said. The Yemeni government has called for increasing support from the international community to bring peace to Somalia, in part by sending international forces, including those from Islamic and African forces to replace Ethiopian forces already in the country. Observers however warned against internationalizing the area of the Arabian Sea without first finding a solution for the situation in Somalia. “Any international protection in the south of the Arabian Sea without considering the situation in Somalia will not solve the problem of piracy which is getting stronger and stronger because of the unrest in Somalia,” said analyst Mohammed Al Sabri, a specialist in the African Horn affairs


Today In History - October 18, 2008 In 1977, West German commandos stormed a hijacked Lufthansa jetliner on the ground in Mogadishu, Somalia, freeing all 86 hostages and killing three of the four hijackers.