n Another 29 Somalis face trial in Seychelles–n Nato fears Somali pirates moving to south Red Sea

By Richard Lough

NAIROBI (Reuters) — Seychelles' Supreme Court convicted 11 Somalis in a rare successful prosecution of pirates from the anarchic Horn of Africa nation, officials said.

The pirates were seized inside the Indian Ocean archipelago's territorial waters after they used automatic weapons to attack a Seychelles coastguard vessel in December. "These convictions will ... serve as a deterrent for prospective Somali pirates who would otherwise have thought they would have come into Seychelles waters with impunity," a statement from Seychelles Department of Legal Affairs said.

All 11 pirates were sentenced to ten years in jail, with eight of them found guilty of committing acts of piracy and three for aiding and abetting pirates.

Somalia has lacked an effective central government for nearly 20 years and does not have the legal infrastructure to support trials.

Captured pirates are often released because of disagreements over who should try them and a lack of evidence if weapons have been thrown overboard. In May, Kenya threatened to terminate its agreement to prosecute pirates if other nations did not share the financial burden.

Another 29 suspected Somali pirates remain in detention on the palm-fringed islands that are better known as an exclusive retreat for celebrities and tycoons.

Meanwhile, 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 US-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 travelled 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 worldwide fell 18 percent in the first half of 2010 from a year ago, as patrols by several navies in the Gulf of Aden curtailed raids, an international maritime watchdog said Thursday.

The decrease was a small sign of improvement after years of steadily deteriorating safety at sea.

Last year, sea attacks worldwide surged by 39 percent to 406 cases, the highest in six years, with Somali pirates' raids on vessels accounting for more than half of the incidents.

Somalia has been ravaged by violence and anarchy since 1991, fuelling a piracy boom that has made its coastal waters among the world's most dangerous.

Particularly perilous is the Gulf of Aden, which is connects the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and is the world's busiest sea lane.

But the number of attacks worldwide fell to 196 between January and June this year, down from 240 incidents in the same period a year ago, the International Maritime Bureau's piracy reporting centre in Kuala Lumpur said in a statement.

It said attacks dropped to 33 in the Gulf of Aden from 86 a year ago. However, it said attacks in the Somali basin — that is, the country's coastal waters, excluding the Gulf of Aden — and the wider Indian Ocean have risen to 51 from 44 a year ago as pirates shifted attention to other areas.