Pirate victim tells of horror
2007-11-16 07:26
Mombasa - With one murdered crewman in the ship's freezer and Somali pirates threatening to execute his son, Captain Xinshen Ling could think of only one thing to do: Threaten to throw himself into the shark-infested waters.
Four pirates immediately rushed to keep him from jumping from the Taiwanese fishing vessel.
The 47-year-old said: "It was a test. I wanted to see how much the pirates valued me .... They know if the captain dies, they will get less ransom."
He is now safe in Kenya after the United States Navy forced the pirates to release the Ching Fong Hwa 168 and its surviving crew, who included Ling's 22-year-old son.
Ling's tale of seven months of being detained by pirates on his own ship is frighteningly common off Somali, a part of the world where high seas crime was on the increase. The pirates made off with an unspecified ransom paid by the ship's owner.
'They threatened me'
But Ling's story had a twist. After even more ransom was demanded, the US Navy stepped in, forcing the pirates to release the Ching Fong Hwa 168 and its surviving crew, who included Ling's 22-year-old son.
A Navy spokesperson said such intervention would continue in response to the spike in piracy.
"The worst time for me was the times they took my son ... they used this boy," Ling said, gesturing at the shaggy-haired Linshangyi Ling over the table at a Chinese restaurant in the Kenyan port of Mombasa. "They threatened me, said if I didn't call Taiwan they would shoot my son."
Andrew Mwangura, head of the East Africa Seafarers' Assistance Programme, said although there had been a spate of pirate attacks off the lawless coast of war-ravaged Somalia - 26 so far this year, up from eight during the same period last year, according to the International Maritime Bureau - deaths were rare.
Somalia 'deeply impoverished'
He said: "Most of the time the pirates want money, not to kill people." Ransoms could reach millions of dollars.
Somalia was deeply impoverished and flooded with weapons. It had long been without a central government with much authority on land, let alone the means to police its long coast. And now, the shaky government was busy battling an Islamic insurgency.
Somali pirates were often trained fighters linked to the clans that had carved the country into armed fiefdoms. They had heavy weapons and satellite navigation equipment, and had seized merchant ships, aid vessels and even a cruise ship.
Ling's encounter with Somali pirates began one sunny April afternoon, after about 15 of them stormed aboard armed with automatic rifles, machine guns and rocket propelled grenades. Ling's crew was unarmed, and one member was shot in the back.
He survived, but when negotiations with the ship's Taiwanese owners were going badly, the pirates executed 32-year-old Chen Tao from China.
- AP