More EU spotter planes urgently needed to combat piracy in Somalia

Interview
LONDON: More spotter planes are urgently needed by the European Union's naval force to combat Somali pirates operating off the horn of Africa country's coast, senior naval officers said Tuesday. Somali pirates have made millions of dollars in ransoms hijacking commercial vessels in the busy shipping lanes of the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean, despite patrols by foreign navies off the Somali coast, disrupting aid supplies and trade routes.
The EU launched its naval operation in December with at least 12 of the 27-member states involved with four to eight warships deployed in the region.
But the force currently has one permanent aircraft available for the mission with another plane seconded for now.
"The shortage for us is actually not in warships but in maritime patrol aircraft," said Richard Farrington, chief of staff for the EU's "Operation Atalanta," which is headquartered in England.
"This is a really critical area for us and we need more," Farrington told Reuters in an interview.
"It does constrain us," he said at a piracy conference in London.
"The EU operation could bring better results if more aircraft were sent European aircraft with long range, useful in detecting [pirate] motherships that can then be inspected by special forces teams," Greek Commodore Antonios Papaioannou, a former commander of the EU force, told Reuters in a separate interview in Athens on Tuesday
The London-based International Maritime Bureau has said piracy incidents nearly doubled in the first quarter of 2009, almost entirely due to Somalia and there were 18 attacks off its coast in March alone.
"We haven't solved the problem, but we've made the pirates' operations more difficult," Papaioannou said, noting that the EU mission could contain but not eradicate piracy as long as law and order were not restored in Somalia..nore..http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=101464