Pirates conjure up images of hook hands, peg legs and eye-patches. The modern species is much less comforting, flourishing in failed states and confronting the crews of huge tankers and bulk carriers with a new and dangerous occupational peril. I once had an incredulous response from a young American radio journalist after remarking that international terrorism should be combated with the same concerted rigour that was once brought to bear on pirates. Being of limited contemporary cultural range, he immediately thought of Johnny Depp hamming it up in the 18^th-century Caribbean as reconceived by Hollywood. But in the words of Captain Pottengal Mukundan, the head of the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), these are more like "maritime muggers" armed with AK-47s, than a cutlass-wielding Captain Blood.

Piracy is a very modern scourge that exists in dangerous proximity to Islamist terrorism, both as a source of revenue as well as the potential use of, for example, a liquefied gas tanker as a maritime super-bomb. Counter-terrorist agencies in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore conduct drills to prevent such an eventuality. A recent incident off Somalia involved pirates threatening to explode a huge ship laden with benzene unless the Japanese owners paid a ransom. There is hard evidence that Somali pirates are closely co-operating with the Islamist al-Shabaab militia, although ironically one of the few accomplishments of the Islamic Courts government was to have suppressed piracy before it was itself deposed by Ethiopian troops.