If the shipping company wants to pay off the pirates what would be the mechanics of actually paying the ransom?
Would this involve wire transfers? If so, how would it be laundered so there wasn’t a trail? The insurance company is obviously going to make some effort to identify the pirates and recover the money. How would the pirates verify the transfer?
Is it a matter of having a bagman deliver cash to the ship? That seems to be fraught with all kinds of dangers.
Would it be air dropped into the ocean near the ship?
After the ransom is paid, how do the pirates get off the ship without getting caught?
Ransoms have been paid for ships in the past so there must be some procedure that works for the pirates.
You’re missing a vital element: the pirates are operating in a lawless territory. There is no doubt who they are. They are living openly and lavishly. The problem is doing anything about it when there is no effective government where they live.
When the ransom is paid, the pirates would just leave, and allow the vessel’s crew to sail it away. Where’s the difficulty?
There are any number of solutions that will result in these fuckers being dead. Those solutions also involve a very high probability of the crew being killed and the ship damaged or lost. If one were totally cold hearted one might say that sacrificing a few crews and ships would be a good way to win out. Are you going to make that call? I have colleagues who work on these ships.
Hmm, nevermind. Brainfart. I was thinking of an empty ship, as if those were usually found routinely sailing along by their lonesome. Of course civilians are involved.
I can’t believe these companies don’t pool together some money and off the bastards though. I don’t believe governments aren’t doing this either.
Huh? Once they have the money, they leave the ship right? Then follow them and blow them to smithereens. It doesn’t seem like it would be all that difficult to follow a speed boat with a fighter or a helicopter.
That’s what I was thinking when I posted the OP. If there was ever a reason for the US, Russia, China, Japan, Britian, etc. to cooperate, this is it. With all of the satellite imagery and GPS capability it would seem that tracking could be done. Was there ever a better use for an Apache helicopter or a Warthog?
They don’t want to attack the pirates because first of all there are humanitarian issues.
Second of all commerical shipping is very vulnerable. If you attack a few pirates, then they attack a few ships they lose 5 lives you lose 100 million dollars worth of oil and pollute the whole ocean when the pirates start blowing up ships at random.
It’s easy enough to do, look at all the problems Al Qaeda 'caused a military ship in Yeman, imagine what someone could do to an unarmed commerical ship, to send the message, DON’T mess with us.
The whole point is not to damage ships, because it costs to replace them. As well as not to lose cargo.
You’re underestimating the problem. A very significant chunk of the economy of the region is piracy. The town is in on it. The caterers are in on it. The local fishermen are in on it. The local brothel is in on it. The local warlords and militia no doubt get their cut. Everyone is in on it, indirectly. The guys on the ships at ransom time are a few guards. The brains behind it are probably on shore somewhere, along with most other pirates. You could follow your plan. Then next time they might perhaps take the crew ashore with them and won’t let them go till all the pirates are safe and the money is safe. Or they’ll kill some crew on one of the other ships that hasn’t been ransomed off yet in retribution.
This isn’t a couple loner guys with some guns like in the movies.
I highly doubt that. They are criminals, not religeous fanatics. Randomly blowing up ships is highly risky with no upside.
If it were so easy to just “blow them up” they would (although India did just that a week ago). There’s a lot of ocean out there and every single commercial ship can’t have it’s own military escort. Apache helicopters only have about a 300 mile combat radius and they don’t operate from carriers. Pirates are hard to see in their little motorboats and there are a lot of little boats out there that aren’t pirates. And, as someone mentioned, they have the support or at least the complacency of the local populous.
There appears to be a misconception as to where the hijacked ships are. They aren’t bobbing in the ocean off some isolated coast. They are in port where there is regular services and traffic. When the money is delivered, the pirates tell the crew they are free to leave and the pirates go back to their homes in town. If there was some helicopter hovering overhead, the pirates would wait an hour or two until it left. When the french pulled off that raid that captured the pirates after they collected their ransom-the pirates figured out how not to collect ransoms. They have safer methods today. When the media says it is a “lawless” country, what they mean is that there is no law that cooperates with the west. But it isn’t every gunman for himself. It is (as I understand it) every group of gunmen for themselves. People go about their day-to-day lives.
