A cargo ship crew member told a Dutch court how he feared for his life during an attack by rocket-toting sea bandits as the first European trial of alleged Somali pirates began yesterday.
"I saw that one of the men had a rocket launcher in his hands," the Dutch Antilles-flagged ship's first machinist told investigators of last year's attack in a statement read out in the Rotterdam court.
He said the pirates, allegedly the five Somali men in court, shot at the ship with assault rifles and later "I saw the rocket launcher being aimed at the bridge. I saw it go off, but it missed. I feared for my life."
The suspects, facing jail terms of up to 12 years for the attack on the Samanyolu cargo ship, denied they had done anything wrong despite one of them admitting they had initially set off to sea with ambitions of piracy.
"The (piracy) plan was abandoned," suspect Abdirisaq Abdulahi Hirsi, 33, told the court.
"The engine (of the skiff) was broken, we had no food and no water and I was ill. We had been at sea for three days, I decided not to follow through (the hijacking), but to die at sea," he said.
A Danish frigate intercepted the men's high-speed boat as they prepared to board the Samanyolu after attacking it with automatic weapons and rockets, according to the prosecution.
The Netherlands issued European arrest warrants for the five men three weeks after their arrest, and they were flown on a military plane from Bahrain the following month to the Netherlands, where they have been in custody ever since.
The trial is expected to last five days and judgment is set to be handed down on June 16, Vincent de Winkel, a spokesman for the Rotterdam court, has told AFP.
According to the London-based International Maritime Bureau, which monitors maritime crime, pirates attempted 215 attacks on merchant ships off the Somali coast in 2009.
Yesterday week, a Yemeni court sentenced six Somali pirates to death and jailed six others for 10 years each for hijacking a Yemeni oil tanker and killing two cabin crew in April last year.