A hijacked Cambodian cargo ship is being held off Somalia’s Berbera port by businessmen owing to a deal which has gone sour and not pirate attack, a regional maritime official confirmed on Saturday.

Andrew Mwangura, East Africa’s Coordinator of Seafarers Assistance
Program (SAP), said the MV Layla-S which was seized on Wednesday after
it unloaded at the port in the semi-autonomous region of Somaliland has
14 crew members on board from Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Somalia and
Syria.

“The ill-fated Cambodian flagged cargo ship MV LAYLA-S is being held
hostage in port Berbera by Somali businessmen owing to a deal which has
gone sour,” Mwangura said by telephone from Mombasa, east Kenya.

“It is said that the vessel has link with Syrian and UAE business men.
We are informed that she was taken by gunmen after discharging her
cargo,” he said.

Piracy has become rampant off the coast of Africa, especially in the
waters near Somalia, which has been without an effective government
since 1991.

Ransoms started out in the tens of thousands of dollars and have since climbed into the millions.

The Horn of Africa nation is at the entrance to the Gulf of Aden, which
leads to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, one of the world’s most
important shipping channels.

The country has been plagued by factional fighting between warlords and
hasn’t had a functioning central administration since the 1991 ouster
of former dictator Mohammed Siad Barre.

The Gulf of Aden, off the northern coast of Somalia, has the highest
risk of piracy in the world. About 25,000 ships use the channel south
of Yemen, between the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea.

Source: Xinhua

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