Map of Pirates hijack fishing vessel around Mozambique december 28
SPAIN
Tuesday, January 04, 2011, 22:50 (GMT + 9)
On December 28, Somali pirates hijacked a Mozambican flagged fishing vessel run by a company with participation from Spanish multinational Pescanova.
The fishing vessel Vega 5 lost contact with the rest of the fleet three days before the end of the year. On 31 December, a Pescanova plane was able to locate it: the boat had a pirate skiff and it was not possible to have contact with the crew.
Now it is sailing towards Somalia whilst being controlled only from the air by planes belonging to the company.
The boat belongs to the firm Efripel Lda, in which the Mozambican government has some participation in, but is operated by Pescamar Ld, a joint venture in which Pescanova has a significant amount of influence.
After the kidnapping, the rest of the Pescamar fleet operating in the area retreated to port.
The longline vessel is 24-meters long, with a capacity for 140 tonnes of cargo. It was also carrying 24 crew, 19 of whom are Mozambicans, 3 Indonesian and 2 Galician (the captain and the boatswain).
At the time of the capture, the ship was sailing off the coast of Mozambique, a hundred miles south of the waters where the European mission Atalanta is operating, so they were unable to do anything about it.
The company Pescanova reported the situation to the Ministry of Environment, Rural and Marine Affairs (MARM) and the families of the crew, but asked for it not to go public. That is why the news was not released until today.
The head of the Ministry of Marine Affairs of the Xunta de Galicia, Rosa Quintana, meanwhile, said the boat "is perfectly located" and every six hours, the owners received a report on the situation.
The Spanish authorities, in joint management with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Defence and MARM, say that diplomatic efforts are under way with the authorities of Mozambique, Kenya and Tanzania for the release of the fishing vessel.
The government ensured that this kidnapping is in fact more like the case of the Sakoba than the Alakrana. The first was a Kenyan flagged longline vessel, the owner of which was of Spanish nationality, while the Alakrana is a Spanish-flagged ship that was held by pirates for 47 days in 2009, reports El País.
Faced with these facts, some Galician polititians asked the local authorities to meet with the central Government in order to discuss efforts aimed at freeing the sailors.
"Today, there have been a total of 44 ships seized, with 771 crew, which shows that the measures announced to eradicate the causes of pirate attacks are not being effective," said Bieito Lobeira, of the Nationalist Party.
During the same week, there were three other attacks: on 25 December, pirates attacked a Taiwanese fishing vessel 120 miles east of Madagascar, on 27 December, a cargo ship from Antigua-Barbados with eight crew members was captured and on 1 January, off the Somali coast, an Algerian vessel with 27 sailors was seized.
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