A court in Bosasso, the commercial capital of the Somali semi-autonomous regional state of Puntland has sentenced 22 pirates to six years of imprisonment each, the judge announced.
The buccaneers were captured by the French Navy a week ago while they were sailing in the high seas in the Indian Ocean, and after their trial, they were jailed for six years each, according to Sheikh Abdirizak Hajji Aden, the judge of Puntland’s high court in Bosasso.
“We have investigated their case and the court found them guilty of being pirates so they have been sentenced to six years imprisonment,” the judge told reporters after jailing the buccaneers Saturday.
But the convicts denied the accusation and said that they were Somali fishermen who were illegally arrested by the French Navy off the coast of Somalia.
The French Navy last week handed over 24 men to the Puntland authorities, but two of them were later released after they were declared innocent, according to the judge.
Meanwhile, on Saturday, the French Navy handed over six other Somali pirates to the Puntland authorities, according to the Puntland Internal Security Minister General Yusuf Ahmed Kheir.
The minister said that Puntland was not capable of detaining hundreds of pirates who are being arrested by the foreign navies off the coast of Somalia. He therefore requested the foreign navies not to send the captured buccaneers to the Puntland region.
“Now we have 246 pirates in our prisons and we cannot afford to have more than that number so we are asking France and other foreign nations whose navies are operating along the Somali coast not to hand the captured buccaneers to us,” the minister said.
While the Puntland region is more peaceful than the rest of Somalia, but the region is the hotbed of notorious buccaneers, drug dealers and human traffickers.
Source African Press Agency
African News from NetNewsPublisher.com
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