Pirates of the Baltic?

While some are looking back to the Barbary Wars to make sense of the Somali pirate attacks, the tempting parallel for recent events in the Baltic Sea dates back to the Viking Age. According to Bloomberg, the Arctic Sea, a Finnish cargo vessel carrying a shipment of wood from Finland to Algeria, was hijacked in the Baltic Sea on 24 July. The crew was tied up and beaten while the pirates searched the ship, though it is not clear if they what they were looking for:

The Arctic Sea was en route to Algeria from Finland with timber when it was boarded between the Swedish islands of Oeland and Gotland in the Baltic Sea on July 24 by the group who identified themselves as police officers, Swedish police said in a statement today. The ship is owned by Oy Solchart Management AB, sails under Maltese flag, and has a crew of 15 Russians.

Sweden has provided warships and soldiers to the European Union’s anti-piracy operation, Atalanta, in the Gulf of Aden. Pirates have attacked vessels off the coast of Somalia 130 times so far this year, with 28 ships seized, the U.S. Navy has said.

Incidents like the detention in the Baltic Sea have never happened “in my life,” Victor Matveev, chief executive officer of Solchart, said in a telephone interview from Helsinki today.

“We’ve operated this vessel for many, many years on a consecutive voyage basis between Finland and the Mediterranean, and this is more than disturbing,” Matveev said. “All the crew members have been working for our company for several years, they’re professional, well educated, and there are no newcomers. It makes us wonder what happened.”

Monsters and Critics has a bit more detail:

According to the ship's 15-member Russian crew, the armed men claimed to be drug enforcement agents and thoroughly searched the ship, reacting violently to anyone who got in their way, including using a rifle butt to knock out teeth from one crew member. The ship was held for 12 hours before the hijackers men left again without taking anything. Investigators speculated that the 'pirates' may have actually been a drugs gang that was acting on a tip to search for contraband.

Meanwhile, in the Gulf of Aden, Somali pirates released a German ship, the Hansa Stavanger, and its 24-man crew after receiving $2.7 million in ransom from the owners. On Monday, a Malaysian-owned tugboat was also released.