Nairobi – The EU’s naval mission off the Somali coast is investigating three piracy attacks, its maritime alert service said Monday, as the Horn of Africa sees the first spike in incidents in months.
Piracy was rampant off the coast of Somalia in the 2000s, peaking in 2011 with hundreds of attacks that cost the shipping industry billions of dollars.
The Horn of Africa nation, which has been highly unstable since the state collapsed in 1991, lies near the opening of the Red Sea, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
Operation Atalanta, the EU’s naval force for Somalia, is monitoring three attacks from the past week, according to its information service, the Maritime Security Centre Indian Ocean (MSCIO).
These include the hijacking of the M/V SWARD merchant vessel on Sunday and a dhow on Saturday.
The M/T HONOUR 25 tanker was seized on April 21.
“Vessels operating in the area are strongly advised to maintain a heightened level of vigilance… particularly within 150 nautical miles of the Somali coast between Mogadishu and Hafun,” MSCIO said in a statement.
The threat of piracy in the region has increased from “low” to “substantial”, according to the Joint Maritime Information Centre (JMIC), part of the Combined Maritime Forces, a 47-country coalition deployed to ensure security in the northern Indian Ocean.
“A Pirate Action Group is reported to be active in the Somali Basin,” it said in its latest update on Sunday.
The “substantial” threat level means there is a high probability of an attack.
Prior to the past week, the last incident reported by JMIC in the region was an attempted pirate attack on a tanker on November 7, 2025.
Security expert Omar Mahmood, of the International Crisis Group, told AFP that piracy was driven “more by opportunity than anything else”.
Pirate groups are always present in Somali waters, he said, and there have been surges in 2023, 2024 and a smaller one last year.
They are “part of a regular pattern where pirate groups continue to exist and basically wait for some opportunity,” said Mahmood, adding that this could be driven by multiple factors, including the weather or the absence of naval patrols in a given area.
Piracy around Somalia significantly decreased after 2011, thanks largely to the deployment of an international military coalition and the creation of a maritime police force trained by the EU in the Somali state of Puntland.
Commercial shipping firms also used new measures such as re-routing further from the coast, increasing speed, and deploying armed guards on board.
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Source: AFP
