Word: ransoms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...incidents could top 300 in 2005. Although attacks on cruise ships like the Spirit are unusual, piracy is one of the world's most stubborn criminal plagues: in waterways around the world, armed gangs wreak havoc with trade routes, interfering with the delivery of relief supplies, holding crews for ransom and stealing tens of millions of dollars in goods every year. Asia remains the most notorious region for piracy, but the waters off the coast of Somalia are fast catching up. Scores of vessels like the Spirit pass along the East African coast every day en route from the Suez...
...Western passengers. But the incident shows that pirates and terrorists share a willingness to use deadly force to achieve their aims. And since pirates make more money--the three big gangs of pirates suspected of working Somali waters now demand and often receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom, according to the Piracy Reporting Center's Choong--they are likely to go after bigger game. With their kidnapping revenues, pirates "can afford to buy themselves some pretty nice boats," says Choong, and hence extend the range of their seizures...
...said, 'This is for your own people. Why are you doing this?'" Three days after the hijacking, the answer became clear. The pirates contacted the Semlow's owner, Inayet Kudrati, 54, director of the Motaku Shipping Agency based in Mombasa, and demanded that he pay a $500,000 ransom for the ship and crew. "I told them I didn't have that kind of money," says Kudrati, speaking to TIME two weeks...
...Batuta. A few days later, after the pirates took Mahalingam and his chief engineer ashore for a day to visit the pirate bosses, the pirates gathered their weapons, piled into their speedboats and abandoned both the Semlow and the Ibn Batuta. The WFP says it didn't pay any ransom, but Kudrati told TIME that his shipping company handed over $135,000. "In the end we had to give in to them," he says...
...Jianguo remembers the day he learned what his wealth might cost him. The multimillionaire owner of a Chinese herbal-medicine company, Li was living in Hainan in the early 1990s when a kidnapper snatched his friend's young son from school and demanded $400,000 in ransom. Police rescued the boy, but not before revealing that the kidnapper had been a close friend of both men. Li says he "realized then that as soon as a Chinese person discloses his wealth, danger is waiting." Today he refrains from inviting friends to his opulent Beijing villa, keeps his net worth...