Terror at Sea: The World's Lifelines are at Risk

Nov. 17, 2003
By Michael Richardson, For The Straits Times

DEPUTY Prime Minister Tony Tan warned last week of the danger of pirate-style attacks by terrorists using ships to bomb major port cities, such as Singapore, or to block key international straits and waterways to disrupt the world's trade and energy supply lifelines.

Al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorist organisations, including the Jemaah Islamiah, have shown that they understand the role of major choke points in global seaborne trade by mounting or planning several maritime attacks in the past few years. The results of two of the attacks close to Yemen were dramatic but largely localised. Insurance rates shot up and ships avoided the area.

But many officials and security experts fear that Al-Qaeda-linked terrorists aim to sink, set alight or explode a huge tanker laden with inflammable material in a key port or choke point for international shipping, or to pack a ship with explosives, sail it into the harbour of a leading port city and detonate it there to cause maximum casualties, destruction and panic.

'There would be serious disruption to global trade if there is an attack against a major port, or a waterway or a choke point, such as the Suez Canal or Straits of Malacca,' Singapore's Defence Minister Teo Chee Hean told the Imdex Asia 2003 conference last Tuesday.

Most world trade is carried by sea. About 80 per cent of the six billion tonnes of cargo traded each year are moved by ship.

Of the key international channels for commercial shipping, the Straits of Malacca is considered one of the most critical global choke points.

Over a quarter of the world's trade and half its oil pass through the waterway which is congested and only 2.4km wide at its narrowest point near Singapore, the world's busiest port. As many as 50,000 seagoing ships use the straits each year, many of them vessels that might be attractive to terrorists.

NETWORK AT SEA



HOW could terrorists take control of a ship? It is possible they could collaborate with pirates or criminal gangs involved in the robbery or seizure of vessels. The International Maritime Bureau recently named Indonesia's waters adjacent to the Straits of Malacca as the most dangerous on the planet, accounting for 87 of the world's 344 pirate attacks in the first nine months of this year.

But it is more likely that Al-Qaeda would use its own ships, or its own agents, to take control of a vessel, for a major maritime terrorist attack. This would give the organisation better control over any operation.

Al-Qaeda reportedly has its own fleet of at least 15 seagoing ships among the more than 46,000 that call at more than 2,800 ports involved in international trade. The organisation could also infiltrate the ranks of more than 1.2 million seafarers, many of them sourced from Asia.

Research has shown that a large number of certificates held by seafarers are fraudulent. Up to 80 per cent of certificates for ratings from some countries have been found to be false.

In such a situation, there is considerable scope for terrorists to masquerade as crew and then take over a ship to use it as a weapon of attack.

A study published last month by Aegis Defence Services, a security consultancy based in London, reported what it said were several new and disturbing developments for maritime terrorism in South-east Asia.

Last March, the chemical tanker Dewi Madrim, was boarded off the coast of Sumatra in Indonesian waters by 10 pirates from a speedboat.

They were armed with machine guns and machetes and carried VHF (very high frequency) radios. They disabled the ship's radio, took the helm and steered the vessel, altering speed, for about an hour. Then they left, with some cash and the captain and first officer, who are still missing.

The Aegis report concludes that this was a case of terrorists learning to drive a ship, and that the kidnapping (without any attempt to ransom the officers) was designed to acquire expertise for carrying out a maritime attack. The Economist described the takeover of the Dewi Madrim as 'the equivalent of the Al-Qaeda hijackers who perpetrated the Sept 11 attacks going to flying school in Florida'.

The Aegis study found evidence that South-east Asian terrorists have been learning to dive, evidently to attack ships from underwater.

The Abu Sayyaf group in the southern Philippines, which has links to Al-Qaeda, kidnapped a maintenance engineer in a Sabah holiday resort in 2000. On his release, the engineer said that his kidnappers knew he was a diving instructor and wanted instruction.

The Aegis report also identified 10 cases of South-east Asian pirates stealing tugs for no apparent reason. The worry is that they are for use to tow a hijacked tanker into a busy international port such as Singapore.

Rear-Admiral (NS) Teo said the payoff for terrorists from a successful maritime attack could be considerable, adding that the damage could be 'horrific' if terrorists turned oil-laden supertankers, or carriers of liquified petroleum gas, liquified natural gas or chemicals into floating bombs.

SHOCKING DISCOVERY



IN JUNE, Greek authorities seized a suspicious ship, the Baltic Sky, in the Mediterranean Sea and found it packed with 8,000 detonators and 680 tonnes of explosives, mainly Anfo, a commercially manufactured ammonia nitrate-based explosive usually used in mining.

Ammonium nitrate is widely used as a fertiliser in Asia and elsewhere. The United States and other Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries imported more than 1.6 million tonnes of ammonium nitrate in 2000, mostly by sea.

With some manipulation, ammonium nitrate can be made into a powerful explosive. It was used in the van bombings in Bali in October last year, and outside the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in August. Those bombings killed and injured several hundred people.

Ammonium nitrate was also the main explosive in the truck bombings in Nairobi, Mombasa and Oklahoma City as well as the first terrorist attempt to bomb the World Trade Center in New York in 1993.

Greek Shipping Minister George Anomeritis said that the Baltic Sky's manifest showed that the cargo was supposedly bound for a company in Sudan with 'a post office box in Khartoum that did not exist'. He described the ship's potential explosive power as akin to 'an atomic bomb'.

This was an exaggeration but it certainly would have wreaked havoc had it been detonated near a port city.

EXPLOSIVE COMBINATIONS



US OFFICIALS blame Al-Qaeda - led by Osama bin Laden, who is of Yemeni origin - for the suicide attack, using a Zodiac speedboat loaded with explosives, against the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen harbour in October 2000 that killed 17 American servicemen.

US officials say that the French-registered oil tanker Limburg, carrying 300,000 barrels of Iranian crude oil off the coast of Yemen, was crippled and set ablaze in October last year by a similar attack when explosives rammed through the double steel hull.

French investigators concurred with this conclusion. The tanker stayed afloat and the fire was put out. But one sailor drowned when the crew abandoned the burning ship. Some 90,000 barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Aden.

Al-Qaeda later claimed responsibility. 'If a boat that didn't cost US$1,000 (S$1,740) managed to devastate an oil tanker of that magnitude, imagine the extent of the danger that threatens the West's commercial lifeline, which is petroleum,' said a communique issued by Al-Qaeda's political bureau on Oct 13 last year.

'The operation of attacking the French tankers is not merely an attack against a tanker, but it is also an attack against international oil transport lines and all its various connotations.'

Rear-Adm Teo said that the attacks on the USS Cole and the Limburg had shown that 'the threat of maritime terrorism is not theoretical but real'.

He added: 'When we, in Singapore, broke up the Jemaah Islamiah network two years ago, we discovered that they were also considering an attack on a US naval ship in our waters.'

A year ago, US authorities arrested Abdul Rahim Mohammed Hussein Abda Al-Nasheri, Al-Qaeda's chief of naval operations, whom they say planned the suicide bombing of the USS Cole.

Nicknamed the Prince of the Sea, he has reportedly confessed to planning more such attacks in the Strait of Gibraltar.

Early last year, he is said to have sent a team of Afghan-trained Saudis to Morocco to prepare for Zodiac attacks on US and British warships as they passed through the Strait of Gibraltar. The Moroccan intelligence service foiled the plot but a key operative escaped.

The most dangerous possibility is that terrorists might eventually get and use a radiological bomb, in which conventional explosives disperse deadly radioactive poison, or even a nuclear weapon, perhaps concealed in one or more of the more than 230 million cargo shipping containers that move through the world's ports each year.

Measures have been put in place by the international community to prevent such a catastrophe from happening. Safeguards are being strengthened as new scanning and sensor technology becomes more widely available and affordable.

Singapore's own port security is among the tightest in the world. It includes intensified patrols by the navy and police coast guard and an integrated surveillance and information network for tracking and investigating suspicious activities.

Port shipping routes have been re-designated to minimise the convergence of small craft with high-risk merchant vessels. The Republic of Singapore Navy also conducts random escorts of high-value merchant ships traversing the Singapore Straits and adjacent waters.

But in some other ports in Asia and elsewhere, security remains inadequate while the international sea lanes leading to and from ports remain largely unguarded.

* The writer, a former Asia editor of the International Herald Tribune, is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. This is a personal comment.

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