We don’t hear much about the prosecution of pirates these days, so we found this INTERPOL release (below) interesting. The Greek tanker Irene SL was hijacked by the Mandek group, a Somali pirate band, in February 2011 carrying 2 million barrels of crude . After serving a stint as a pirate mothership, she was released in April 2011 when the hijackers reportedly received a $13 million ransom, according to the Somalia Report news website. Now the Greeks are taking pirates to court for the first time.

Greece to prosecute first maritime piracy case with evidence gathered by INTERPOL team
Dec. 12, 2012

LYON, France – Evidence gathered by an INTERPOL Incident Response Team following the release of the hijacked oil tanker Irene SL in April 2011 is to be used by Greece in its first maritime piracy prosecution.

The announcement came during a meeting between Chief of the Hellenic Police Lieutenant General Nikolaos Papagiannopoulos and INTERPOL Secretary General Ronald K. Noble at the world police body’s General Secretariat headquarters to identify ways for additional support to be provided to the Greek police.

The response team, supported by the South African Police Service and in coordination with European Union Naval Force and INTERTANKO, was deployed to Durban in South Africa to conduct a crime scene investigation and debriefing of the hostages on board the Irene SL, following its release by Somali pirates 58 days after the vessel was hijacked off the coast of Oman.

Several of the crew members on board were also able to identify four of their captors from an INTERPOL photo album on maritime piracy, containing images provided by member states and naval forces operating in the Gulf of Aden and the Western Indian Ocean.