India will bring in and prosecute 35 Somali pirates its navy captured on a hijacked ship MV Ruen off Somalia, a navy official said, in a departure from its recent practice of rescuing vessels and crew but leaving the disarmed pirates at sea.
The captured pirates are due to arrive in India on Saturday and will be handed over to the law enforcement agencies, the official said.
Indian navy commandos managed to release the Malta-flagged commercial ship MV Ruen on Saturday, which had been hijacked 450 nautical miles east of Socotra in the northern Arabian Sea by Somali pirates on Dec 14. It marked the first hijacking of a merchant ship by Somali pirates since 2017.
During the piracy peak, India’s navy used to prosecute and jail in India pirates involved in major attacks, but in recent months the navy has taken to leaving the pirates at sea. The Ruen pirates will be the first India prosecutes in years, the official was quoted as saying.
India has deployed at least a dozen warships in the Gulf of Aden and the northern Arabian Sea since December, which enables it to assist vessels east of the Red Sea, where the navies of several countries are trying to secure shipping routes under attack from Yemen’s Houthi militants.
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