Nigeria: IMB Report Puts Country's Pirate Attacks in 2007 At 42 - AllAfrica.com

Teddy NwanunobiAbuja

An International Maritime Agency (IMB) study for 2007 have revealed that Nigerian Waters experienced an increased onslaught from plagiarists to as many as 42 times.

The figure, which was disclosed by the 'Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships', stands for a 12.6 per cent addition from the 12 violent onslaughts the nation's Waters witnessed in 2006.

According to the yearly report, which was published last January, "two mariners were killed - with tons more than than injured, taken surety or kidnapped - in Nigerian waters" last year.

IMB also said that it tracked 10 plagiarist onslaughts in the nation's Waters in the first one-fourth of this year.

It set the figure to stand for more than 20 per cent of the planetary total, and warned that more force was "spiralling out of control".

Although it blamed the South-south Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger River Delta (MEND) for being responsible for the addition in attacks, IMB's director, Captain Pottengal Mukundan, could not understand why the Nigerian Navy (NN) have been not able to "deal with this job effectively".

According to report, Mukundan, who blamed a "lack of proper law enforcement", said that there was "really no excuse" for the nation's Navy's failure.

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Last September, the NN had announced that it had seized 236 ships, jerk boats and flatboats during the preceding three years, as portion of a thrust to cut down illegal offshore activity that had resulted in an 80 per cent decrease in petroleum oil thefts.

In response to the up-to-the-minute statistics from the IMB's Kuala Lumpur-based Piracy Coverage Centre, the NN was reported to take a firm stand that it was doing its best with limited resources - in peculiar a deficiency of suitable vessels.

"It is a fact that the Nigerian Navy is experiencing an acute deficit of patrol boats for anti-piracy operations," Captain Henry Babalola, the NN's manager of information, was reported to have got said.