The Somali ambassador to Russia on Tuesday defended the decision to set adrift a group of pirates who briefly seized the Liberian-flagged Moscow University tanker last week.
The tanker, with a Russian crew of 23, was hijacked on May 5 off the Somali coast. After a Russian naval operation on May 6 freed the tanker, capturing 10 pirates and killing one, the disarmed pirates were put into inflatable boats without navigational systems and pushed off into open waters.
Russia said it had no choice but to set the pirates adrift, citing the absence of international laws to prosecute them, and their boat disappeared from radars an hour later. A top-ranking Defense Ministry source said on Tuesday the pirates are believed to have died.
"It doesn't concern us whether the pirates died or not. We, the states of Russia and Somalia, are responsible for a criminal's civil rights when he voluntarily surrenders or we take him alive," ambassador Mohamed Handule told journalists.
Handule said law-abiding citizens should be pitied, rather than criminals, adding that Somalia has no funds to search for the pirates in the sea.
He told the journalists to imagine they are law enforcement officers in the wilderness. "You free the hostages, but you can't do anything with the criminals and you leave them in the woods. Are you guilty?" he asked.
Handule said the pirates are unlikely to have survived as the location where Russian sailors left them is 250 miles from the coast.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pledged last week to punish pirates who seize vessels off the Somali coast "with the full force of maritime law."
Until a legal system allowing hijackers to be punished is created, "we will have to act as our forefathers did when they met pirates," he said, without specifying how exactly the pirates should be punished.
Russia has repeatedly called for the creation of a special juridical body to try hijackers captured during anti-piracy operations off the Somali coast. In late April, the UN Security Council adopted Russia's proposal to consider the creation of a new court for this purpose.
MOSCOW, May 11 (RIA Novosti)
