BANGKOK: They no longer fly the skull and crossbones flag, instead clambering aboard ships wielding guns and knives under the cover of darkness.

''They put knives on our throats and threatened to kill us if we resisted,'' said Pham Van Hoang, deputy captain of the 4000-tonne Vietnamese-registered ship MT Sunrise 689, which went missing for a week with a crew of 18 after leaving Singapore on October 2.



Modern piracy is surging in the waters of South-east Asia, including the Malacca Strait, a bottleneck for 50,000 ships a year carrying more than a third of the world's shipping trade.

The attack on the MT Sunrise loaded with 5200 tonnes of oil was the twelth ship hijacking in the region since April.

There were 129 reported cases of piracy and armed robbery against ships in Asia from January to September, the highest number in at least eight years, according to ReCAAP, a 20-country organisation set up to combat piracy and armed robbery in Asia.

Many other incidents are unreported, anti-piracy experts say, because some shippers want to avoid their names being associated with lax security or lost cargoes.

Half of the world's ship attacks now take place in strategic waters off Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, a region that accounts for the transportation of almost all crude oil that east Asia imports from the Middle East, experts say.


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