The Gulf of Guinea is safer than it used to be, with a steady decline in piracy incidents and armed robbery at sea reported in the past year.

After three months of calm that offered hope the problem may be receding, another incident of piracy has been reported in the Gulf of Guinea, the world’s most dangerous maritime region.

Piracy is drawing annually over US$500 million from the countries which line the Gulf of Guinea, which has turned into the world’s current maritime piracy hotspot, far outpacing the waters off the coast of Somalia and the rest of East Africa.

Once the most pirate-infested region on the planet, the waters off the coast of Somalia are now home to a different maritime crime - illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, according to a new report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. 

A court in Togo issued extensive prison sentences to eight maritime pirates on Monday for the attempted hijacking of a tanker ship in May of 2019. It’s the first time that pirates have been tried and sentenced in a country where maritime piracy has been an ongoing serious problem. 

Despite the decrease in trade and travel brought on by the novel coronavirus pandemic, 2020 saw a distinct rise in maritime piracy at some of the usual hotspots around the world but with a concerning trend emerging in the Gulf of Mexico which could become a new hunting ground for modern pirates, maritime security experts said.

Pirates killed one and kidnapped 15 crew members of a Turkish cargo ship on Saturday in the latest attack on vessels sailing off the coast of West Africa -- the most dangerous region in the world for piracy.

It was 7:40 a.m. when the chief officer of the MV Duke called Captain Ripusad Prasad in his quarters to say that a boat was following them.

An undated photo of West African pirates. (Credit: U.S. Naval Institute CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)