Maritime Jewel was a double-hulled oil tanker launched in 1999 and completed in 2000. Entering service that year, the ship was known as MV Limburg until 2003. The 332-metre (1,089 ft) ship carried crude oil between ports in Iran and Malaysia. On 6 October 2002, Limburg was attacked by suicide bombers, causing roughly 90,000 barrels (14,000 m3) to leak into the Gulf of Aden. One crew member was killed and twelve more wounded in the attack. Four days after the attack, the tanker was towed to Dubai where she was repaired and renamed Maritime Jewel. Maritime Jewel was broken up for scrap at Chittagong, Bangladesh on 15 May 2018.
An oil terminal is an industrial facility for the storage of oil, petroleum and petrochemical products, and from which these products are transported to end users or other storage facilities. An oil terminal typically has a variety of above or below ground tankage; facilities for inter-tank transfer; pumping facilities; loading gantries for filling road tankers or barges; ship loading/unloading equipment at marine terminals; and pipeline connections.
Piracy in the Gulf of Guinea affects a number of countries in West Africa as well as the wider international community. By 2011, it had become an issue of global concern. Pirates in the Gulf of Guinea are often part of heavily armed criminal enterprises, who employ violent methods to steal oil cargo. In 2012, the International Maritime Bureau, Oceans Beyond Piracy and the Maritime Piracy Humanitarian Response Program reported that the number of vessels attacks by West African pirates had reached a world high, with 966 seafarers attacked during the year. According to the Control Risks Group, pirate attacks in the Gulf of Guinea had by mid-November 2013 maintained a steady level of around 100 attempted hijackings in the year, a close second behind the Strait of Malacca in Southeast Asia. Piracy in the Gulf of Guinea continues to be a concern to the shipping industry, which is affected significantly. At the same time, governments in the region generally highlight that the fight against piracy requires a broad understanding of maritime security throughout the Gulf of Guinea.
Piracy off the coast of Somalia occurs in the Gulf of Aden, Guardafui Channel, and Somali Sea, in Somali territorial waters and other surrounding places and has a long and troubled history with different perspectives from different communities. It was initially a threat to international fishing vessels during the early 2000s, only to rapidly escalate and expand to international shipping during the War in Somalia (2006–2009).
There were 49 ships reported pirate attacks in the first three months of 2008, up from 41 in that period of 2007. According to the ICC International Maritime Bureau, in those attacks: "Seven crew members were taken hostage, six kidnapped, three killed and one missing – presumed dead." Up until mid-November 2008, more than 90 vessels had been attacked by pirates in the year. At the same time, with a more than 75 per cent increase since the previous year, pirates were holding 13 ships captive in the Somali ports of Eyl and Hobyo.
MV Manifa is an oil tanker formally owned and operated by Vela International Marine. With a length overall of 330 m (1,080 ft) and a capacity of 2.2 million barrels (350,000 m3) of crude oil, she is classified as a very large crude carrier or VLCC. Vela is based in the United Arab Emirates and is a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian state oil company Saudi Aramco. Sirius Star is one of Vela's 24 tankers, of which 19 are VLCCs. Since her launch, the ship has been registered in Monrovia under the Liberian flag of convenience. She has since been reflagged to Saudi Arabia
The MV Biscaglia was a chemical tanker managed by Ishima Pte. Ltd. of Singapore and held by Industrial Shipping Enterprises Management Company LLC of Stamford, Connecticut, USA.
Piracy in the 21st century has taken place in a number of waters around the world, including the Gulf of Guinea, Strait of Malacca, Sulu and Celebes Seas, Indian Ocean, and Falcon Lake.
Operation Ocean Shield was NATO's contribution to Operation Enduring Freedom – Horn of Africa (OEF-HOA), an anti-piracy initiative in the Indian Ocean, Guardafui Channel, Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea. It follows the earlier Operation Allied Protector. Naval operations began on 17 August 2009 after being approved by the North Atlantic Council, the program was terminated on 15 December 2016 by NATO. Operation Ocean Shield focused on protecting the ships of Operation Allied Provider, which transported relief supplies as part of the World Food Programme's mission in the region. The initiative also helped strengthen the navies and coast guards of regional states to assist in countering pirate attacks. Additionally, China, Japan and South Korea sent warships to participate in these activities.
Operation Dawn 8: Gulf of Aden was a naval operation carried out by the Royal Malaysian Navy against pirates in the Indian Ocean on 20 January 2011. In response to the hijacking of MV Bunga Laurel, the Malaysian Shipborne Protection Team deployed an attack helicopter and 14 members of the naval counter-terrorism group PASKAL in two rigid-hulled inflatable boats to retake the vessel and rescue the crew. After one night of trailing the tanker, the Malaysian forces successfully retook the ship by force on 20 January 2011, resulting in the wounding of three and the capture of four out of 18 pirates, and all 23 vessel crewmembers rescued.
On 18 November 2012, eleven Indonesian pirates hijacked MT Zafirah, a Malaysian tanker, in the South China Sea. The tanker crew was left by the pirates on a lifeboat in the sea two days after the hijacking but were subsequently rescued by Vietnamese fishing vessels on 21 November when their lifeboat was drifting around 118 nautical miles in the waters off Vietnam's southern Bà Rịa–Vũng Tàu province. All the pirates managed to be tracked by Vietnam Coast Guard and Vietnam People's Navy with information provided by Malaysian based International Maritime Bureau and Singaporean based RECAAP, which led to their arrest after a brief of standoff near Vũng Tàu port.
This timeline of piracy in the 1990s is a chronological list of key events involving pirates between 1990 and 1999.
MT Norte, formerly MT Iver Explorer, was a Brazilian oil tanker.
MV OS 35 is a bulk carrier registered in Tuvalu, a flag of convenience. The vessel first came into news when a piracy attack on her off the coast of Somalia was thwarted jointly by ships of China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy and of the Indian Navy.
On 25 October 2020, the Liberian-flagged crude oil tanker Nave Andromeda issued a distress call while in the English Channel just off the coast of the Isle of Wight, in response to the presence of seven stowaways who had boarded the ship in Lagos, Nigeria. Hampshire Constabulary responded to the call, and the British maritime special forces unit, the Special Boat Service, boarded the vessel and detained the stowaways. Two of the stowaways were subsequently charged with conduct endangering ships, though the charges were later dropped after the Crown Prosecution Service found insufficient evidence that the ship or crew were threatened, or that the men had intended to hijack the ship.
As a practice of piracy, petro-piracy, also sometimes called oil piracy or petrol piracy, is defined as “illegal taking of oil after vessel hijacks, which are sometimes executed with the use of motorships” with huge potential financial rewards. Petro-piracy is mostly a practice that is connected to and originates from piracy in the Gulf of Guinea, but examples of petro-piracy outside of the Gulf of Guinea is not uncommon. At least since 2008, the Gulf of Guinea has been home to pirates practicing petro-piracy by targeting the region's extensive oil industry. Piracy in the Gulf of Guinea has risen in the last years to become the hot spot of piracy globally with 76 actual and attempted attacks, according to the International Maritime Bureau (IMB). Most of these attacks in the Gulf of Guinea take place in inland or territorial waters, but recently pirates have been proven to venture further out to sea, e.g. crew members were kidnapped from the tanker David B. 220 nautical miles outside of Benin. Pirates most often targets vessels carrying oil products and kidnappings of crew for ransom. IMB reports that countries in the Gulf of Guinea, Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Togo, Congo, and, especially, Nigeria, have experienced petro-piracy and kidnappings of crew as the most common trends of piracy attacks in the Gulf of Guinea.
Piracy kidnappings occur during piracy, when people are kidnapped by pirates or taken hostage. Article 1 of the United Nations International Convention against the Taking of Hostages defines a hostage-taker as "any person who seizes or detains and threatens to kill, to injure, or to continue to detain another person in order to compel a third party namely, a State, an international intergovernmental organization, a natural or Juridical person, or a group of people, to do or abstain from doing any act as an explicit or implicit condition tor the release of the hostage commits the offense of taking of hostages ("hostage-taking") within the meaning of this convention." Kidnappers often try to obtain the largest financial reward possible in exchange for hostages, but piracy kidnappings can also be politically motivated.
Piracy network in Nigeria refers to the organisation of actors involved in the sophisticated, complex piracy activities: piracy kidnappings and petro-piracy. The most organised piracy activities in the Gulf of Guinea takes place in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. A large number of both non-state and formal state actors are involved in a piracy operation, indicating a vast social network. As revealed by the arrested pirate Bless Nube “we do not work in isolation. We have a network of ministries’ workers. What they do is to give us information on the location and content of the vessels to be hijacked. After furnishing us with the information, they would make part payment, and after the hijack, they would pay us the balance.” Pirate groups draw on the pirate network to gain access to actors who provide security, economic resources, and support to pirate operations. This includes government officials, businesspeople, armed groups, and transnational mafia.
On 3 August 2021 the asphalt tanker Asphalt Princess, travelling from Khor Fakkan, the United Arab Emirates, to the Sohar, Oman, was attacked and boarded in the Gulf of Oman. The ship is flagged in Panama. The vessel is owned by Glory International, listed as based in the Emirati free zone.
