Suspected Somali pirates ordered held on charges related to attacks on 2 US Navy ships

Somali suspects ordered held on piracy charges

NORFOLK, Va. — One of 11 suspected Somali pirates entered a not guilty plea Wednesday on U.S. charges related to attacks on two Navy ships off the coast of Africa.

Attorneys for 10 other suspected pirates asked a federal judge for more time to talk with their clients to determine whether they understood the charges. They complained they had not found an interpreter or had sufficient time with their clients — some as little as 30 minutes.

U.S. Magistrate Judge F. Bradford Stillman in Norfolk ordered that all 11 remain detained on the charges.

He also delayed the arraignments for nine of the suspects until Friday, giving them time to talk with their attorneys with help from an interpreter. He allowed one attorney to submit his client’s plea next week because of a scheduling conflict.

“I am concerned about the defendants being fully advised,” Stillman said, citing the “mind spinning, disorienting trip” that brought the suspects to the U.S. for trial.

“I do not want to stumble through the arraignments.”

Maxamad Cali Saciid, 27, was the lone defendant to enter a plea after his attorney, Keith Loren Kimball, said he located a local interpreter and spent 2 1/2 hours with his client.

Stillman asked if Saciid had read the charges against him and the defendant responded through an interpreter, “I memorized the whole thing.”

“I am not guilty. I did not commit this crime,” he responded when asked how he pleaded.

Each man is charged with piracy, attacks to plunder a vessel, assault with a dangerous weapon, and other weapons counts. Piracy carries a mandatory life sentence, while the other charges carry penalties of 10 to 35 years.

Five of the men were captured March 31, after the frigate USS Nicholas exchanged fire with a suspected pirate vessel west of the Seychelles.

The other six were captured after they allegedly began shooting at the amphibious dock landing ship USS Ashland on April 10 about 380 miles off Djibouti, a small nation facing Yemen across the mouth of the Red Sea. Two of the accused have visible physical injuries, the result of the exchange with the Navy, according to the government.

A prosecutor, Joseph DePadilla, disclosed that during the attack on the Nicholas, the defendants said they mistakenly went after the Navy vessel thinking it was a merchant ship. He said the government had eyewitnesses — sailors — and forensic evidence linking the suspects to the crime.

The Ashland and Nicholas, which are each home-ported in Virginia within 20 miles of the courthouse, were part of an international flotilla protecting shipping in the region.

Despite the language barrier and the distant location from the alleged crimes, an expert in international law said the prosecution of the 11 should not be especially difficult.

“Of piracy cases, I’d think this would be one of the easier ones to prove, in the sense that you have witnesses who can be made available to the court at the insistence of the secretary of defense,” said Ruth Wedgwood, a law professor at Johns Hopkins University.

“Your witnesses are easier to muster and I suspect, with the technology of the Navy, you could even do a video link which would be sufficient for a jury,” she said.

The 11 had been held on U.S. ships for weeks off Somalia’s pirate-infested coast as officials decided whether and where they could be prosecuted.

U.S. Attorney Neil H. MacBride, who has declined to discuss any aspect of the government’s prosecution, said the Defense Department pushed for a criminal trial because the Navy was “the victim” in the attacks.

“In this particular case, we felt that there was proof beyond a reasonable doubt that crimes, including piracy and others, had been committed and that a criminal prosecution was appropriate,” he said last week after the defendants’ first court appearance.

The Somali mission to the United Nations said the suspects should be tried by a regional or international tribunal, not in a U.S. courtroom.

“I find difficult to believe that the international community is rendered helpless by bunch of Somali teenagers, chewing khat, and armed with AK47 and RPG’s,” Omar Jamal, first secretary to the Somali mission, wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press. Khat is a mild stimulant popular in Somalia and other countries in the region.

He called for a “cessation of this ongoing extrajudicial practice and vigilante justice.”