Aw Kombe also said the pi­rates were in touch with busi­ness­men in Kismayu over re­leas­ing the ves­sel, Al Kausar.

The traders want the dhow be re­leased with­out ran­som but my friends say they may not re­lease with­out at least some cash,” he added. “They are still dis­cussing.”

The iden­tity and ori­gin of the hi­jack­ers was dis­puted, how­ever. A Gal­mudug state of­fi­cial said the pi­rates came from north­ern So­ma­li­a’s semi-au­tonomous state of Punt­land while Kombe, a Punt­land pi­rate leader, put the blame on “our friends from Gal­mudug state”.

The Al Kausar was com­man­deered in the vicin­ity of So­co­tra Is­land while en route from Dubai to Punt­land’s port of Bosasso, ac­cord­ing to United King­dom Mar­itime Trade Op­er­a­tions (UKMTO), which co­or­di­nates ship­ping in the Gulf of Aden area.

Ship own­ers have be­come less wary of piracy af­ter a long pe­riod of calm off the Horn of Africa, ex­perts say, and some have started us­ing a riskier route known as the So­co­tra Gap, be­tween So­ma­lia and So­co­tra Is­land, to save time and costs.

“The pi­rates who hi­jacked the dhow are from Punt­land,” said a gov­ern­ment of­fi­cial in Gal­mudug state, who did not want to be named be­cause he was not au­tho­rized to speak on the in­ci­dent.

“No doubt, the Punt­land pi­rates who re­cently hi­jacked the oil tanker are now hold­ing the dhow,” he told Reuters, re­fer­ring to the hi­jack­ing last month of an oil tanker.

That was the first such seizure of a ves­sel since 2012 and the pi­rates re­leased it within a few days af­ter a clash with Punt­land’s ma­rine force.
Burhan Warsame, Gal­mudug’s min­is­ter for ports and sea trans­port, also told Reuters the same pi­rates who seized the oil tanker last month “must have hi­jacked this dhow”.

But Ab­d­i­rizak Mo­hamed Dirir, the for­mer gen­eral di­rec­tor of Punt­land’s anti-piracy agency, said the dhow’s lo­ca­tion made it more likely that the pi­rates were from Gal­mudug.

Kombe, who headed the pi­rate gang that com­man­deered the oil tanker, told Reuters there were four groups of pi­rates from Punt­land “who are still in ocean hunt­ing for ships to hi­jack”.

“But the dhow is in El Hur near Hobyo and the pi­rates hold­ing it must be our friends from Gal­mudug state.”