Somali pirate: 'We're not murderers... we just attack ships'
Jay Bahadur, the author of Deadly Waters: Inside the Hidden World of Somalia's Pirates, meets Abdullahi Abshir – a man who claims to have hijacked more than 25 ships in the Gulf of Aden.
It had taken five days to arrange this meeting. Somali pirates are hard to track down, constantly moving around and changing phone numbers. Days earlier, frustrated and eager to begin interviewing, I had naively suggested approaching some suspected pirates on the streets of Garowe, a rapidly expanding city at the heart of the pirates' tribal homeland. Habitually munching on narcotic leaves of khat, they are easy enough to spot, their gleaming Toyota four-wheel-drives slicing paths around beaten-up wheelbarrows and pushcarts. My Somali hosts laughed, explaining that to do so would invite kidnapping, robbery, or, at the very least, unwanted surveillance. In Somalia, everything is done through connections - clan, family or friend - and these networks are expansive and interminable. Warsame, my guide and interpreter, had been on and off the phone for the better part of a week, attempting to coax his personal network into producing Abdullahi "Boyah" Abshir. Eventually it responded, and Boyah presented himself.
I was being taken to a mutually agreed meeting place in an ageing white station wagon, cruising out of Garowe on the city's sole paved road. My two UN-trained bodyguards, Said and Abdirashid, perched attentively in the back seat and in the rear-view mirror was a sleek new Land Cruiser, a shining symbol of the recent money pouring into Garowe. It carried Boyah, Warsame and another fixer. [
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