Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Again From the "No Shit" File

This doesn't seem particularly newsworthy, but still interesting, I guess:

The Somali pirates who hijacked a Ukrainian freighter loaded with tanks, artillery, grenade launchers and ammunition said in an interview Tuesday that they had no idea the ship was carrying arms when they seized it on the high seas.

'We just saw a big ship,' the pirates’ spokesman, Sugule Ali, told The New York Times. 'So we stopped it.'

In a 45-minute-long interview, Mr. Sugule expounded on everything from what the pirates want — 'just money' — to why they were doing this — to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters' — to what they have to eat on board — rice, meat, bread, spaghetti, 'you know, normal human-being food.'
Although one wonders how an area 200 miles off the Somali coast is "our waters," that is where the latest round of Somali piracy began:
The piracy industry started about 10 to 15 years ago, Somali officials said, as a response to illegal fishing. Somalia’s central government imploded in 1991, casting the country into chaos. With no patrols along the shoreline, Somalia’s tuna-rich waters were soon plundered by commercial fishing fleets from around the world. Somali fishermen armed themselves and turned into vigilantes by confronting illegal fishing boats and demanding that they pay a tax.

'From there, they got greedy' explained Mohamed Osman Aden, a Somali diplomat in Kenya. 'They starting attacking everyone.'
Greedy - isn't that just like a bunch of pirates?

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