US Charges Young Somali with Piracy on High Seas

young Somali man has appeared in a U.S. court charged with piracy.
Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse is the sole survivor of a pirate attack on a U.S. cargo ship earlier this month off the coast of Somalia.
On April 8, Somali pirates tried to commandeer the container ship Maersk Alabama - but failed to do so after the 20 man crew regained control of the vessel. The pirates took its captain, Richard Phillips, aboard a lifeboat and held him hostage for several days. Muse was injured in a skirmish with the Maersk Alabama crew and was in custody of the U.S. military when on April 12 Navy SEAL snipers shot and killed three pirates and rescued Captain Phillips.
Muse appeared before a U.S. Federal judge in New York on April 21 and was charged with - among other things - piracy.
J. Peter Pham, a maritime security expert with James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia says there is a specific U.S. legal statute dealing with piracy.
"The controlling statute is section 1651 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code - it's the Federal Penal Code. And it's pretty sweet and to the point," he said. ''It says, literally: 'Whoever on the high seas commits the crime of piracy as defined by the law of nations and is afterwards brought into or found in the United States shall be imprisoned for life.' It's going to be a federal trial in the federal district court of New York and it's going to be a jury trial. And the defendant will have his day in court and if convicted, the sentence is life imprisonment."
Pham says the U.S. hasn't prosecuted anyone for the crime of piracy in more than a century.
"So it's going to be a new experience both for the prosecution and the defense. It's not unlike the situation we found ourselves in the early 1990s when Andrew McCarthy [former assistant U.S. attorney leading the prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others in the 1995 terrorism trial] and his team, in the same district court, had to bring themselves up to speed on the law of terrorism. So it's going to be a new experience," he said...more..http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2009/04/mil-090425-voa03.htm