Piracy In Europe ?

While we might have grown somewhat used to stories of piracy on the open seas, those events usually take place in some isolated part of the Indian Ocean or off the coast of Africa. But a story is now emerging that we may be seeing the first example of piracy in European waters.

According to the stories a Maltese flagged ship sailed through the English Channel but never made it to Gibraltar. The story also indicates that there was some incident in Swedish waters where the crew was attacked by people claiming to be police, yet the Swedish authorities say nobody was on duty in the area at the time of the attack. The attackers seemed to focus their efforts on Russian crew members.

Officials are speculating about several possible reasons for the mystery:

Graeme Gibbon-Brooks assesses the risks faced by shipping companies for the Dryad Maritime Intelligence Service.

“There are a number of possibilities for what happened to the ship, right from it having slowed down because of bad weather and it could arrive tomorrow, or to it having sunk, but the facts don’t point to either of those scenarios,” he said.

“So there are two fairly strong lines of possibility that people are looking at. The first is that the pirates remain on board and the ship was in fact hijacked and that when they got to the Straits of Gibraltar, they continued south down the west coast of Africa in order to sell the cargo or the ship.

“The second possibility is that the crew is complicit, is that the crew have effectively stolen the ship.”

Many are speculating that this may be a case of the crew stealing the ship in order to obtain insurance benefits. Under such a scenario the ship would be repainted, renamed and reflagged in order to continue sailing the seas.

It will be interesting to see where this goes