ABSTRACT

An hour after leaving the port of Kuala Tangjong, Indonesia, on 22 October 1998, pirates clambered aboard and hijacked the Alondra Rainbow, a Japanese merchant vessel transporting aluminium ingots to the port of Miike, Fukuoka Prefecture. The pirates kidnapped the crew of the Alondra Rainbow, consisting of the Japanese Captain, Ikeno Kō, and Chief Engineer, Ogawa Kenzō and 15 Filipino seamen, and, 7 days later, set them adrift on a life raft in the Bay of Bengal. The pirate gang renamed the Alondra Rainbow to disguise its identity and, under the new name of the Mega Rama, transferred half of the cargo to another ship, before heading to Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates. The Japanese owners of the vessel contacted the Japanese Ministry of Transport (MOT, now the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport – MLIT) which dispatched a Japan Coast Guard (JCG) vessel to search for the missing merchant ship and crew. On 16 November, an Indian naval vessel, the INS Prahar, after a day-long chase, captured the Mega Rama in the Indian Ocean (The Hindu, 21 November 1999: 1; New Straits Times, 29 November 1999: 29; Hino 2000: 104-05; Takai 2002: 6-7; Mukundan 2002: 62-63; Terashima 2001: 38). An Indian court later sentenced the pirates to seven years of hard labour (Yamada 2003: 136). The previous year there had been a similar attack on the Tenyu, a Japanese owned and Korean manned vessel, but since the Alondra Rainbow incident involved the presence of a Japanese Captain and Chief Engineer on board, this case received far greater media coverage in Japan, and compelled the Japanese government to act (Terashima 2001: 38-39).