The U.S. Navy plans an aggressive effort to capture pirates off the coast of Somalia with the aid of a country in the region that would agree to prosecute and hold them, a naval commander said on Thursday.
U.S. Navy Vice Adm. William Gortney, commander of the U.S. 5th Fleet, said the United States is nearing a deal with an unidentified country that would agree to take the pirates into custody once captured by U.S. forces in Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden waters off the Horn of Africa.
Up to now, U.S. forces in the region have limited their operations to deterrence and disruption because no country including the United States has been willing to hold the pirates.
"The State Department is close on finalizing an agreement," said Gortney, who declined to identify the other country involved.
"We're expecting it ... this week, next week. But we're very close," he told reporters at the Pentagon.
"We are going to aggressively go after pirates," he told reporters at the Pentagon. "It's going to be a mixture of surveillance and then rapid action once we observe them."
Pirates pose a growing threat to shipping off the African coast, forcing insurance prices to rise and bringing naval vessels from an unprecedented 14 countries including China, India and Russia to protect shipping.
But the threat continues to grow. Gortney said about a dozen attempted boardings have occurred in early January, a number about equal to the monthly averages of the last quarter of 2008.
Four boardings have proved successful in the past six weeks, bringing to 11 the number of vessels held by pirates and to 210 the crew members as hostages, he said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE50F06M20090116?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews
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