Russia releases captured Somali pirates: official
ATTENTION – ADDS quotes from Russian officials, detail ///

MOSCOW, May 7, 2010 (AFP) – The Russian defence ministry said Friday that it had released a group of Somali pirates who were captured in the Gulf of Aden by its naval forces after seizing a Russian oil tanker.
“This is connected with there being an incomplete international legal basis” to keep them detained, the defence ministry’s chief spokesman Colonel Alexei Kuznetsov told the Interfax news agency.
A Russian defence ministry spokeswoman contacted by AFP confirmed the report but declined to give further information on the pirates’ current location.
Russian investigators had said Thursday that the 10 captured pirates would be brought to Moscow to face charges.
The pirates were captured when marines from a Russian warship stormed the tanker, called the Moscow University, in a dramatic rescue mission.
The tanker’s 23-person crew had avoided being taken hostage by barricading themselves in a secure cabin and were unharmed.
Russian officials on Friday urged the international community to develop legal procedures for dealing with pirates.
“In our view, the international community should take effective and urgent measures on this,” Russian foreign ministry spokesman Igor Lyakin-Frolov told Echo of Moscow radio.
“One of the difficult parts of countering maritime piracy is the problem of establishing jurisdiction over those suspected of piracy and armed sea attacks, as well as investigating such people and bringing them to justice.”
Moscow’s ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, said he would raise the issue of creating a “unified legal basis for fighting piracy” at a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council on May 19, Interfax reported.
The Kommersant daily, citing sources close to the investigation, reported that the problem which had forced Russia to release the pirates was that some of the captured pirates claimed that they were actually hostages themselves, who had been forced to raid the oil tanker by real Somali pirates.
Some Russian media reports suggested that the captured pirates could have been released to Puntland, a semi-autonomous region of Somalia where local authorities could put them on trial.
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