The MV ALMEZAAN cargo ship was en route to Mogadishu when someone on board shot killed an aspiring attacker with a small caliber something, as eunavfor.com reports. You’d think there wasn’t much of a downside here. Pirates bad. Dead pirates good. Wrong. “The bottom line is somebody has been killed and someone has to give an accounting of that,” Arvinder Sambei, a legal consultant for the United Nations’ anti-piracy program, told The Associated Press. Good luck with that. “As with many piracy incidents, legal jurisdiction is ambiguous,” AOL reminds us, in case we missed that bit of Pirates of the Caribbean. “In this case, the attacked ship was owned by a company based in the United Arab Emirates, but flown under the Panamanian flag. The Spanish frigate was operating as part of the European Union Naval Force and directed to the pirate boats by an Italian admiral.” Sorry; the admiral’s nationality makes a difference? If you want to hear something really interesting, hit MORE for a description of the Blackwater buffoon’s attempts to enter the anti-Somali pirate business.
As the frequency of pirate attacks has increased, a growing number of private security firms have been offering their services to shipping companies and cruise ships. Famously, Blackwater Worldwide, now now known as Xe Services, even bought an 830-ton ship to field an anti-piracy force for potential clients.
That business never materialized, however, and the company faced legal complaints from its crew for alleged mistreatment. With little work and mounting bills, Xe earlier this year put the anti-pirate ship up on the auction block.
Look for a book on the Blackwater Boyz (a.k.a. xe) soon. Meanwhile, I wonder where the guns used for this abortive endeavor ended up . . .
