Plotting to sink Africa's pirates

Casey Christie: Some of the best minds in the security business have just met in Portsmouth in the UK to brainstorm new tactics to counter the growing threat of piracy at sea.

They have come up with some bizarre ideas, including a laser rifle which, it is claimed, can temporarily blind and disorient an attacker up to a kilometre away.

South Africans were strongly represented. Many ex-South African police and army members who have been working in Iraq and Afghanistan have now gravitated to life at sea, repelling pirates.

Maritime hijacking has become a multimillion-dollar business, and there were more attacks and hijackings in 2010 than ever before.

Remarkably, this was in spite of the fact that a substantial number of international ships now patrol the Gulf of Aden.

Action Stations, the maritime security conference in the Portsmouth dockyard, took place in the face of the mounting crisis - which could have an impact on food and fuel prices .

Solutions highlighted at the conference included long-range acoustic devices, green lasers, armed security teams, escort vessels, barbed wire, pepper spray, "citadels", airborne reconnaissance and surveillance, and real- time anti-piracy intelligence.

The conference organiser was John Dalby, respected in the maritime insurance world as the repo man of the industry. He has been using men with special skills to recover hijacked and stolen ships since the 1990s. His reported minimum fee is $1-million a vessel.

Now, however, the focus has changed from recovering hijacked ships to putting systems in place to thwart pirate attacks.

Not only is providing security services at sea a specialised concern, but the legal hurdles which have to be cleared to arm the security teams are complex and daunting.

Ship owners and operators have to evaluate the various laws that relate to the national flag of the ship, the security crew and their countries, as well as the laws that apply in the various waters and ports where the ships travel.

And, of course, there is the crucial issue of whether the weapons on board are legally held.

One of the easiest ways to get legal weapons on board the ships is through South Africa - getting SA-licensed weapons with an export permit on board through a security officer registered with the Private Security Regulatory Authority.

Illegal weapons still predominate. Security expert David Stone, who prides himself on being able to supply legal weapons to security teams in just 48 hours, reports that the use of illegal arms by maritime security companies aboard vessels occurs on a massive scale.

So much so that illegal AK-47s sold in Yemen, which used to cost between $300 and $400 each, now cost $3000, as the available stock is diminishing fast. This is because, before docking at their final port, the security teams throw their rifles into the sea.

The debate about the use of armed security teams is not only centred on the legality of the weapons, but also the obvious associated dangers of having arms on board oil and gas tankers, which are floating bombs.

But it is a common tactic of pirates now to open fire on a targeted vessel on approach - for two reasons: to get the vessel to stop and to see if there is an armed response from the boat.

Some argue that arming security teams will lead to arms escalation. But the pirates already commonly use rocket-propelled grenades. I also have it on good authority that on two of the currently hijacked and held vessels, the pirates mounted .50-calibre machine guns - about as escalated as it can get!

On the question of whether or not to use weapons, Stephen Askins, a partner in a law firm, pointed to a disquieting new tactic of pirates - to use "mother ships".

Mother ships are vessels that have been hijacked by pirates and are now used as a mobile base from which to prey on other ships, either directly or by deploying smaller skiffs.

Mother ships are a game-changer. Pirates have extended their reach and now attack faster vessels further from the now heavily patrolled Horn of Africa off the Somali Coast. They pounce on ships as far east as the Indian coast and as far south as Mozambique and the Seychelles.

The pirates can also cope with bad weather in their mother ships.

The concern of Askins is that now, even if a ship has armed protection - usually a four-man team - they will be no match for the potential 40-man pirate gang on a mother ship.

South African John Beadon from a vessel protection company in Cape Town, has come up with an interesting adaptation called an anti-boarding device - a barrel containing barbed wire that is deployed at the first sign of trouble. The barbed wire shoots overboard into the water at an angle. This results in lines of barbed wire bouncing around the sides of the vessel, creating an unattractive target and painful deterrent.

Beadon has also developed the climb-stopper device, a sprinkler system set off by an alarm, that aims pepper spray at attacking pirates.

There are also companies that provide a purely intelligence-based solution. They provide clients with updated, relevant intelligence on the movements of PAGs (pirate action groups) and other factors, including weather systems and wave heights, which make boarding difficult. They then guide their clients through the least dangerous waters/routes based on intelligence compiled from various sources.

But Chris Greyling, a former South African Special Forces soldier and currently president of the Pan-African Security Association, was sceptical. He asked: "What if the pirates feed you false information in order for you to lead your clients into traps?" He got the response that the pirates were not yet synchronised and were more like a ragtag gang.

Greyling told me: "To say that these guys are unsophisticated is BS! These guys are running a sophisticated base of operations and are backed up by a hell of a lot of cash. These guys are not stupid and are co-ordinating their efforts."

I have also been reliably informed that the pirate warlords are moving their money and operations into Kenya and are now flourishing there.

On my arrival on the second day of the conference, I was told that a maritime security operator whom I had met the day before had been urgently called away to speak to a ship owner whose vessel had just been taken.

Pirate attacks have surged in 2011 and look likely to continue. There seems to be a lack of a co-ordinated response, part of the reason for the conference.

A solution is needed. Piracy affects you, increasing oil prices at the pumps and driving up the prices of the goods those ships deliver to your stores.

The International Maritime Bureau estimates that maritime piracy costs transport vessels between $13-billion and $15-billion a year in losses in the waters of the Pacific and Indian oceans alone.

A long-lasting and stable solution won't be found on water, though. Rather, it needs to be solved on land - in Somalia. And there are some security experts who believe that there are large and powerful organisations that do not necessarily want law, order and stability in Somalia - this could affect their pockets and profits.

I believe that, as an African problem, Somali piracy needs to be solved by Africans.

Piracy will continue to make headlines, and if I know anything about Africa, the pirates will become more brutal, more aggressive and more deadly.

Christie is a South African who lives in London, where he is an international security consultant