When a group of armed pirates invaded a merchant vessel off the coast of Somalia in 2008, a man named Ali Mohamed Ali wasn’t anywhere near the attack.
Ali was on land then, in Somalia, where he lived and worked as an education official. Two days later, he boarded the vessel to serve as the negotiator and interpreter between the ship’s Danish owners and the Somali pirates. He received tens of thousands of dollars for his role as the intermediary. The pirates, who held the crew and the ship for 71 days, received $1.7 million in ransom.
