![]() ![]() In the fall of 2008, Bahadur, a young Canadian, quit his job writing market-research reports in Chicago and flew in an aging Russian Antonov to Puntland, a breakaway region of northeastern Somalia that has become, as he puts it, “the epicenter” of the piracy business. But, as Jay Bahadur makes clear in “The Pirates of Somalia,” buccaneering has evolved into a very modern activity, complete with night vision goggles, GPS units and even investment advisers. The hijacking of the Alabama, the first seizure of an American-flagged vessel in 200 years, drew the country’s attention to the return of a scourge once associated with plank-walks, treasure chests and peg-legged marauders. ![]() The surviving pirate was seized and taken to the United States, where he pleaded guilty in a Manhattan courtroom to a host of charges and was sentenced to 33 years and nine months in a federal prison. At dusk on April 12, Navy snipers killed three of the Somalis, and Phillips was rescued unharmed. Bainbridge, a destroyer that arrived at the scene not long after the hijacking. For five days, the pirates and their hostage drifted in the Indian Ocean, shadowed by the U.S.S. Bobbing in a lifeboat with the skipper, 53-year-old Richard Phillips, they began negotiating with the ship’s owners via cellphone for a multimillion-dollar ransom. On April 8, 2009, the Maersk Alabama, a 17,000-ton United States cargo vessel, was hijacked by four Somali pirates several hundred miles east of Mogadishu. ![]()
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