Bartamaha  (Nairobi):-The commander of NATO’s counter-piracy flotilla said Wednesday that Somali pirates squeezed by a multinational armada in the Gulf of Aden may be shifting some operations to the southern Red Sea where naval forces lack clear authority to stop them.

In addition to one recent attack in the area, Commodore Michiel Hijmans said there have been “a lot of false alarms” where mariners believed pirates were pursuing them, including occasions where shots were fired.

“We are very cautious and we’re worried that there might be more attacks in that area,” Hijmans said aboard the Dutch frigate De Zeven Provincien after it anchored in Dubai.

Foreign navies have U.N. Security Council approval to hunt pirates in Somalia’s territorial waters with advance notice using “all necessary means.” But the Red Sea lies beyond that area of jurisdiction, creating a possible new front for pirates to operate.

Hijmans’ vessel is the flagship for the NATO counter-piracy force operating off the Somali coast. It works alongside separate U.S.-led and European flotillas, as well as patrols from India, China and Russia. The international patrols are credited with thwarting attacks by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden, a corridor between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean that is home to some of the world’s busiest sea lanes.

But international naval forces are reluctant to aggressively pursue the pirates around the tip of Yemen and through the choke point at the southern end of the Red Sea because they would be passing entirely through other nations’ waters, Hijmans said.

“You have to be very careful what you do in the territorial waters of another country,” he said. “I don’t have a mandate to operate with helicopters and ships inside the territorial waters” of countries such as Eritrea and Yemen.

Pirates attacked the Marshall Islands-flagged MT Motivator on July 4 in the northern part of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, which links the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. The chemical tanker was carrying lubricating oil and had a Filipino crew of 18.

Hijmans said that was the only confirmed attack so far in the southern Red Sea believed to be carried out by Somali pirates who may have traveled to the area under the cover of darkness.

“It was a change in tactics by the pirates,” he said.

The bulk of international counter-piracy patrols operate in the Gulf of Aden, where they provide convoys and maintain a transit corridor to protect merchant vessels heading to and from the Suez Canal at the top of the Red Sea.

Pirate attacks in the area have dropped by nearly two thirds since the start of the year, according to the International Maritime Bureau’s piracy reporting center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

But the maritime watchdog cautioned that attacks elsewhere, particularly off Somalia’s eastern coast in the wider Indian Ocean, are on the rise as pirates shift their operations elsewhere and gain the ability to travel further out to sea.

Much of Somalia has been mired in violence and anarchy since 1991, giving pirates an opportunity to flourish in the Horn of Africa nation’s lawless waters. The armed marauders often use small skiffs to attack larger, slower moving ships, which they then hold along with their crews for multimillion-dollar ransoms.

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