JAKARTA, 25 July 2003 - Piracy around the world is at a record high, the International Maritime Bureau says in a report today by its monitoring centre in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. There were 234 attacks on ships in the first six months of this year. This is up 37% on the same period in 2002, and the first time in more than a decade of the bureau's record-keeping that the figure has exceeded 200.
The seas around Indonesia's sprawling archipelago were the most dangerous, with 64 attacks in six months, far outstripping the next worst - Bangladesh with 23 attacks, and India and Nigeria with 18 each. "There are no signs that the number of attacks will drop unless Indonesia takes serious steps to address the problem," says the report.
And whereas at one time pirates armed themselves with knives and other crude weapons, the number of attackers using guns rose to 53 in the first half of this year compared with 31 in the first half of 2002. Sixteen sailors were killed by pirates, mostly in Bangladesh, the Philippines and Indonesia - almost triple the six deaths reported in the same period last year. Injuries surged from 21 to 52, and hostages taken nearly doubled to 193.
The bureau's director, Pottengal Mukundan, said yesterday: "It is vital that coastal states ... deploy patrol vessels capable of dealing with these incidents and ensure that these criminals do not treat these waters as a pirate's charter."
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