A Singapore-based regional maritime security centre said on Friday that three bulk carriers were robbed earlier this week in the Singapore Strait, which is between the Strait of Malacca in the west and the South China Sea in the east – 19 km-wide (12 mi) and 113 km-long (70 mi). Singapore is on the north of the channel while the Indonesian Riau Islands are on the south with a maritime border being shared by the two countries along the strait.
A spike in piracy has been seen in one of the busiest commercial waterways in the world in recent years. The incidents of “petty crime” took place between Aug 8th to 9th, when the ships were in the Phillip Channel in the Singapore Strait, said the Information Fusion Centre, a regional facility hosted by the Singapore Navy.
The centre said in a statement that one of the vessels was flagged to Cyprus, while the other two carried Liberia flags. The centre also stated that 50 such incidents have been recorded since Jan 23rd, spanning from India to Indonesia and South Korea, urging vessels in the vicinity to exercise caution.
It said that barges, bulk carriers and tugs with low freeboard and slow speed while underway, were involved in the majority of incidents, which took place in hours of darkness. The centre suspected that all the robberies were most likely to have been carried out by the same group of perpetrators based on the number of people involved, time intervals and proximity.
The Straits Times reported that on July 4th, pirates reportedly stole some scrap iron after boarding a Malaysia-flagged tug and barge along the Singapore Strait. The incident, which had taken place in Malaysian waters, occurred at about 8.30 am, with no one reported injured.
When asked, a spokesman for Malaysian shipping corporation GimHwak Group, which owns the affected vessel Jin Hwa 40, had said that the barge was boarded by the attackers from a sampan (flat-bottomed wooden boat). The spokesman said that although there had been nine crew members on board the tug, no one had been hurt as the barge was unmanned when the attack happened.
The incident had been reported to the Republic of Singapore Navy’s Information Fusion Centre (IFC) and the attackers had left around 9.30 am.
According to a press summary by IFC, the vessel had been sailing from Brunei to Malaysia at the time of the attack.
There have been 41 sea robberies in the Singapore Strait from January to June according to the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia Information Sharing Centre.
