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Teenage pirates sentenced in Thai court

Malaysia urges focus on South China Sea piracy
Kuala Lumpur (AFP) Nov 30, 2009 - Pirates attacks in the South China Sea are increasing and Malaysia has urged the bordering nations to work together to fight the threat, reports said Monday. "Piracy there is not conventional any more. Pirates feel that the countries don't patrol the sea enough," Defence Minister Zahid Hamidi was quoted as saying by the New Straits Times newspaper. Zahid said that state-of-the art technology adopted by the navies of some littoral nations were useless without cooperation in combating the high-seas menace. The International Maritime Bureau (IMB), a global maritime watchdog, said there were 22 attacks reported in the area for the first 11 months of this year compared to 17 for the whole of 2008.

"The cases are quite sporadic as once we report an attack to the authorities the numbers go down but they then slowly creep up again," said Noel Choong, head of the IMB's global piracy reporting centre. He said the affected area lies in a triangle between Indonesia's Anambas Islands, Tioman Island off Malaysia and the eastern Singapore Straits. The South China Sea is bordered by Brunei, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam. "The challenge for neighbouring countries is to try to contain this piracy level while it is still small before it gets out of control like in Somalia," Choong told AFP. Pirate attacks in the Malacca Strait, which was once the world's worst piracy hotspot, have declined sharply in recent years thanks to large-scale coordinated patrols involving Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. More than 30 percent of world trade, and half the world's oil shipments, pass through the busy waterway.
by Staff Writers
Bangkok (UPI) Nov 30, 2009
A Thai court has handed down 25-year sentences to three Burmese teenage pirates for murdering a British yachtsman off the coast last March.

Malcolm Robertson, 64, was beaten with a hammer during a struggle on board his 44-foot yacht "Mr. Bean," named after a string of coffee shops he owned near London in the United Kingdom.

His body was thrown overboard off the Andaman coast and the pirates then tied up his wife, Linda. The pirates, ages 19, 18 and 17, remained on board for nearly 10 hours before fleeing in a dingy with electronic goods.

Thai fishermen found Robertson's body 10 miles north of Satun's Lipeh Island, along the coast south from Phuket, a week later.

Both the Robertsons were qualified yacht masters who had sailed around the world, had been married for 25 years and had four children and seven grandchildren.

The sentence could have been up to 50 years each, according to local media reports, but it was reduced because they were remorseful and pleaded guilty.

Linda Robertson, 59, welcomed the sentence, according to a report on the BBC World Service news Web site. "I don't want to trivialize Malcolm's death but I don't think 25 years in a Thai prison is going to be pleasant for them. I do hope the time they spend in jail will help them reflect and realize the heinous crime they committed.

"I also believe they were victims themselves. I don't think they had any plan. The fact that they didn't kill me, which they could quite easily have done, shows some compassion from them."

A Western journalist at the trial reported that the three teenagers were not always referred to as pirates because of their circumstances. Defense lawyers said the Burmese boys, who had also spent time in Thai detention centers for illegal immigrants, had been sold to Thai fishing boat owners.

They reportedly jumped ship near the coast and swam to the small island off Koh Adang in the Tarutao National Marine Park, from where they attacked the Robertsons' boat, which had been moored close to land.

The fishermen in the southern area of Thailand have a history of cooperating with, but also engaging in acts of piracy against, illegal boat people, mostly from Vietnam during the 1980s.

Many of the boat people are taken to work on fishing boats that also act as transport for smuggling operations, according to reports by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. At the height of the boat-people exodus from Vietnam, around half of the occupants of Vietnamese boats were subject to rape and abduction attacks.

On the open seas Thai-registered large commercial fishing boats have also been subject to pirate attacks. Thai authorities are still looking for the Union 3 fishing boat and its crew that was attacked off the coast of Africa at the end of October.

Somali pirates on two small boats attacked and boarded the vessel north of the Seychelles and off the coast of Somalia, the EU Naval Force reported.

A patrol aircraft spotted the boat 230 miles north of the Seychelles and headed for the Somali coast.

Thai Union Frozen Products, the country's largest producer of canned and frozen seafood, said the Union 3 was one of its four vessels in the area. The company said it was most concerned for the 25 crew, none of whom were Thai nationals.

The Union 3 is the third fishing ship from Thailand seized in the area in the past year. The EU Naval Force estimates that Somali pirates are holding eight vessels somewhere along the African coast.

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China hosts meeting on Somalia piracy
Beijing (AFP) Nov 6, 2009
China on Friday opened a two-day international conference on efforts to protect shipping in the Gulf of Aden from Somali pirates, the defence ministry said. The meeting would be attended by representatives from "Russia, Japan, India, the European Union, and other countries' marine forces, including NATO," it said in a fax to AFP. "The main topic of discussion will be the implementation ... read more







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