Pirates More Active and Violent
Piracy was up ten percent last year, to 269 attacks. That’s actually miniscule, when you consider that there are over 33,000 large (over 1,000 GRT tons) transport ships at sea every day. Even though these ships are close enough to the coast to be attacked less than a third of the time, that still means that a pirate attack is much less likely than running into a bad storm and suffering some damage.
But most of the attacks occur in three hot spots (off Somalia, the Niger river delta in Nigeria and western Indonesia). Most of these are the work of about a dozen gangs, who consider robbing merchant ships as just one illegal form of income among many.
