U.S. seeks joint patrol in Strait of Malacca

U.S. seeks joint patrol in Strait of Malacca

Marc Burleigh, Agence France-Presse/Nantes, France

Piracy has made the Malacca Strait off Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore extremely dangerous for international shipping, requiring joint action by countries in the region before the problem worsens by perhaps involving terrorist groups, a U.S. Coast Guard official said on Thursday.

"The Malacca Strait is very well known in the maritime community as a very high risk area for piracy and other armed robberies," Commander Clay Diamond, a liaison officer to the US state department, told AFP on the sidelines of an international Maritime Security conference in Nantes, western France.

But with more than 1,000 vessels and more than 10 million barrels of oil passing through the zone every day, and Asian extremist groups such as Jamaah Islamiyah active in Southeast Asia, there are fears that the Strait may become targeted by terrorists.

"There is every indication to think there's a link between pirates and other maritime criminals and terrorist organizations," Diamond said.

He added that there was the "obvious" scenario of a ship -- a gas or oil tanker for instance -- being hijacked and used to attack a port city as a floating bomb.

"But less obvious and just as problematic is that piracy and other criminal acts at sea can be used as fund raising operations for terrorists."

He added: "We want to break the nexus between smuggling, drug smuggling and the terrorists."

New shipping rules brought in a year ago by the UN's International Maritime Organization (IMO) go some way to combating piracy, notably with all vessels over 500 tons needing to have a "silent" alarm installed that would tell nearby authorities they had been illegally boarded or were facing other peril.

The initiative, known as the International Shipping and Port Facilities code, was introduced at the behest of the United States in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks amid fears that cargo or passenger ships might be used to perpetrate terrorist attacks.

Diamond said the United States was currently looking at a new system that might be added to the code later in which all big ships were fitted with satellite transponders that would allow them to be tracked at all times around the world.

But he and other delegates at the Nantes conference said that more than technology, cooperation was key in tackling marauders in the Malacca Strait and in other international waters.

"The only way to combat piracy at sea is to work regionally," the officer said.

The three Asian countries enclosing the Strait last year started coordinated patrols of the Malacca Strait, and Singapore's navy in March began putting small elite military teams on some cargo ships and passenger liners to protect them against pirates and terrorist attacks.

The IMO was encouraging these efforts, and Diamond said that the United States approved the initiatives because "this is not a situation where the US is there to respond physically."