Abdi Kheyre, the skipper of a crew of seven captured Somalis
Eleven months ago, Abdi Kheyre was sailing in the Gulf of Aden. It was the middle of jiilaal, the hottest of Somalia’s dry seasons, between December and March. With food on land scarce, Kheyre and his six shipmates had turned to the seas. Kheyre was the natural captain: at 35, he was the oldest and had the most experience of the region’s unpredictable waters. The fish close in were too small and the men had been forced to go further out to sea, where large Asian and Spanish trawlers – much resented by Somalis – could often be seen from the shore. Kheyre and crew said their prayers on the sand and then prepared to sail out into deep water. Not a cloud dotted the sky; February 11 was a fine day for fishing. At around midday, Abjojie Dugenia, a Filipino seaman aboard the MV Polaris, a Marshall Islands-flagged commercial vessel en route to the UK, received a radio call from the watch tower. A small white motor-boat was approaching at high speed from starboard. The Polaris was making its way through “Pirate Alley” in the Gulf of Aden, the approach to the 30km-wide Bab-el-Mandeb strait between Djibouti and Yemen, the entrance to the Red Sea and thence to the Suez canal. Just five days earlier, 21 sailors taken hostage nearby had been released, their captors walking away with $3.2m after threatening to dynamite the ship.As the skiff came closer, Dugenia noticed that the man standing in its bow was motioning him to let down the ship’s ladder. He could see that the crew of the skiff were wearing combat fatigues and carrying automatic rifles. By the time Dugenia had dashed to the wheel, the pirates were trying to throw a grappling hook over the side of the Polaris. The larger vessel made a series of sharp turns; the pirates’ rope wouldn’t hold. A mayday call went out and a nearby US missile carrier, the USS Vella Gulf, responded. The Vella Gulf was part of Combined Task Force 151, a US-led international fleet on anti-piracy patrol. At 2.20pm, the Americans radioed back to say they had the pirates in custody. The following day, photographs of Abdi Kheyre and his crew with their battered white skiff were plastered across newspapers around the world – trophies of a mighty western fleet keeping the seas safe for commerce.That is how Kheyre and his co-defendants came to be sitting in orange jumpsuits in Chamber 4 of Mombasa’s Central Law Courts in early October. At first glance, with his pointed beard and piercing almond eyes, Kheyre resembled the prototypical Somali pirate of western imagination. He spoke deliberately, intoning his words: “It’s only since we’ve been taken to Kenya, since we’ve been in this court, that we’ve heard that they are accusing us of being pirates. When we saw the helicopter [from the Vella Gulf] circle our boat, we put our hands up straight away. There was no resistance. We didn’t try to fire or escape. It was the Americans who attacked us.”..more..http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5509a84c-fb2b-11de-94d8-00144feab49a.html
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