Skip to main content

Six Indonesian pirates arrested Malaysia

Malaysian maritime authorities said they arrested six Indonesians attempting to rob a ship in the Strait of Malacca, the latest in a surge of piracy attacks in the strategic waterway.The suspects were spotted by Malaysian patrols early Sunday morning as they tried to board a merchant vessel off southern Johor state near Singapore, Maritime Enforcement Agency chief Admiral Zulkifli Abu Bakar said.

"The pirates realized they were spotted and tried to flee on their boat but our patrol vessel gave chase and fired several warning shots before intercepting the pirate ship in Malaysian waters," he told AFP.He said the pirates appeared to have come from the nearby Indonesian island of Batam and had gathered in the area intending to rob three ships. An investigation was under way.

The International Maritime Bureau (IMB) in June sent an alert to ships traversing the area, warning of a heightened piracy risk following the hijacking of three tugboats and a barge this year.The global maritime watchdog has said the waterway - wedged between the coast of Sumatra and the Malay peninsula - has seen a surge in reported attacks by armed pirates, with at least 41 incidents since January.

"We are pleased that the Malaysian authorities have arrested these pirates. It shows their commitment and seriousness in dealing with this menace," Noel Choong, head of the IMB's Kuala Lumpur-based piracy reporting centre, told AFP. "Strong enforcement will deter pirates from attacking more ships in the area," he added.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

child sex workers in Bandung

A policeman, right, watches over two masseuses and their customers during a raid on suspected prostitution activities at a hotel in Changchun, in northeast China's Jilin province The Bandung authority is at loss to uncover cases of covert prostitution involving junior and senior high school students, whose number continues to rise in the West Java capital. Eli, a sex worker advocacy program mentor from the Rumah Cemara Group in Bandung, said it was hard to provide advocacy to teenagers involved in covert prostitution since most were not receptive. The number of those involved in covert prostitution is believed to be higher compared to commercial sex on the streets, she added. Eli has been providing support to more than 200 housewives and child sex workers over the past two years, around 20 of who are senior high school students between the ages of 15 and 16. "They are psychologically unstable at those ages. They are hard to handle due to their strong motivation to ea

Bricklaying in Aceh

Refleksi: http://www.thejakartapost.com/detaileditorial.asp?fileid= 20070405. F07&irec= 6 Bricklaying in Aceh I was looking back the other day at a letter in the British newspaper The Times as written by Professor H. H. Turner in January 1925, who was challenging the government's statement that a good British bricklayer would lay 500 bricks per day which made him the best in the world.The professor claimed to have found one bricklayer who dealt with 2000 bricks in eight hours and another one who laid 890 bricks in just one hour -- one presumes the brickie ran out of steam after a while. It made me wonder just how many bricks were being laid in Aceh province, bearing in mind the climatic differences between gloomy old England and sun-drenched Indonesia. The heat factor alone could well in fact reduce the work rate by up to fifty percent, and then of course there are the incentive factors of salary and working conditions. An English bricklayer in 1925 would have earned about one

torture is still a part of law enforcement in Indonesia

INDONESIAN suspects and convicts are routinely tortured by police and prison wardens to obtain confessions or information, a report claims.   Beatings, intimidation, burnings and rape were so commonplace that they were considered the norm, with few victims bothering to lodge complaints, Restaria Hutabarat of the Jakarta-based Legal Aid Foundation said yesterday. The findings are based on year-long interviews with 1154 suspects and prison inmates in the capital and four other major cities in 2009-10. Questionnaires were also given to 419 police, prosecutors, judges, wardens and rights activists who accompanied suspects during the legal process. "We found that torture is systematic," Mr Hutabarat said, adding that it started with the arrest and continued during interrogations, trials and after imprisonment. "It is seen as a normal way to get information and extract confessions, " he said. Indonesia, a nation of 237 million people, only emerged from decades of dic