NO ONE seized by pirates can be considered lucky. But many of the seamen taken hostage by Somali pirates have at least been set free fast, once fat ransoms have been paid. At the height of the piracy scourge off the coast of Somalia almost a decade ago, the average ransom to free a crew and vessel was, by one tally, $3.5m.
Some seamen, however, have languished in captivity for months or even years because their companies balked at coughing up—often because their ship was uninsured, or had run aground, or had been disabled by fire, or had sunk. Crew taken from them were sometimes tortured. “Hard as it may sound, these guys, they don’t have any value,” says John Steed, a former UN man in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital.
Pirates are still loth to cut their losses by freeing such hostages without payment. Of the few Somali pirates who have given up in this way, most were soon killed, Mr Steed notes, since they could not repay the...Continue reading
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