Seafarers Note Alarming Rise in Piracy

NEW YORK , Jan. 29, 2001 — -- In late November 1998, fishermen in Shantou, China dredged up a find that would go down in the annals of modern maritime history.

But their find was nothing anybody in a boat would hope to repeat, ever again.

In their net, they found a corpse, its mouth taped shut and bound to a metal weight. Over the course of several days, fishermen in the area would bring up several more — all crew members of the Hong Kong-owned, Panama-flagged cargo ship, the Cheung Son, that had been reported missing weeks before.

Police later determined the 17,000-ton freighter had been hijacked by pirates en route from Shanghai to Malaysia. It had been carrying low-value furnace slag from Shanghai to Port Klang.

The pirates are believed to have killed all of the ship's 23 crew members, and sold the cargo. They might have gotten away with the crime, had Chinese authorities not discovered some photographs while investigating a suspect.

The pictures showed pirates partying among the dead on the Cheung Son.

Last winter, Chinese authorities executed 13 of the Cheung Son's pirates. The boat and its cargo have never been found.

The tale of the Cheung Son is just an extreme example of a crime that is happening with increasing frequency.

The International Maritime Bureau or IMB, an organization dedicated to preventing crime on the high seas, says in 1999 it received reports of nearly 300 pirate attacks. For the year 2000, they were estimating more than 450 attacks.

"It has definitely been a great increase," said Captain Pottengal Mukundan, the bureau's director.

But these are not the eye-patched swashbucklers seeking gold doubloons you read about in storybooks. They have evolved with the times.

Just as the Barbary Pirates once haunted North Africa, and Captain Kidd stalked the Caribbean of colonial America, today's pirates have made the world's more remote and lawless regions their home.

Pirate attacks have taken place in South America — Peru, Ecuador and Venezuela — and Africa — Angola, Nigeria and Somalia.