UN chief Ban Ki-moon demands global action to combat pirates as annual attacks top 400

UN SECRETARY General Ban Ki-moon has called for global action to combat the "alarming" increase in pirate attacks, which topped 400 last year.

Addressing a UN General Assembly conference on piracy, he said there were 406 pirate attacks in 2009, 100 more than in 2008.

The bulk of the attacks came off the coast of East Africa, which saw a sevenfold increase between 2005 and 2009.

Ban called for a reassessment of what was working and what needed to be improved to combat piracy, adding that suspects must also be brought to justice, "not simply let go, or left to die".

He said the problem needed specifically to be addressed in Somalia, where anarchy has reigned since 1991 when warlords overthrew long-time dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and then turned on each other.

Britain's Rear-Admiral Peter Hudson, commander of the European Union's naval counter-piracy flotilla, said that since February there had been "a huge surge" in the number of Somali vessels going to sea to conduct pirate acts.

International forces patrolling off Somalia "have interrupted, broken up, and dismantled more than 60 pirates' action groups, processing somewhere over 400 suspected pirates in the last 12 weeks alone, which is three times the number of action groups that we saw last year", he said.

He said that while the presence of the international flotilla had reduced the number of attacks in the strategic Gulf of Aden from about 20 a month in the summer of 2009 to about four or five a month, pirates had successfully moved the attacks closer to India.

He said that since there were limited opportunities to prosecute pirates, the only alternative was to destroy their equipment so they could not hijack any other ships.

Kenya and the Seychelles have been the only countries to prosecute suspected pirates, but Kenya gave six months' notice in April that it would end them because of the high cost of trials and imprisonment.