Convicted Pirate Gets Another Three Years in Prison for 2017 Attack

 

A convicted pirate leader has had another three years added onto his sentence for a kidnapping in the Gulf of Guinea in 2017 - a rare example of a court proceeding for a pirate from the Niger Delta. 

The story of the arrest of Itoruboemi Benson Lobia begins in earnest in 2018, when he led the hijacking of the Dutch-owned freighter FWN Rapide off the coast of Port Harcourt. At Lobia's instruction, the gang kidnapped 11 members of the crew, injuring one with gunfire and causing organ damage to another due to untreated malaria. After a month of negotiations, operator ForestWave talked the pirates down to a final ransom payment of $340,000, a cost reduction of more than 80 percent compared to the criminals' original demand. 

After the kidnapping, Dutch authorities decided to go after Lobia. Using inquiries about his knowledge of piracy and dangling the possibility of a job, they lured him to fly to Johannesburg - where he was promptly arrested on an Interpol warrant. He was extradited to the Netherlands to stand for a vanishingly-rare criminal trial for piracy.  

The Rotterdam District Court found Lobia guilty of acting as the leader of the hijacking gang, and he was sentenced to a term of 8.5 years in Dutch prison for the FWN Rapide attack.

However, it turned out that the FWN Rapide was not the only ship he had hijacked. The year before, in 2017, he had been involved in the kidnapping aboard the German-operated cargo ship BBC Caribbean in the Gulf of Guinea. In that earlier hijacking, Lobia and his gang abducted eight seafarers and brought them back into the remote waterways of the Niger Delta. After a month of negotiations, the hostages were ransomed for an undisclosed sum. 

Meanwhile, three crewmembers remained aboard BBC Caribbean, and they navigated all the way to safety in Las Palmas. On arrival, the ship was searched; among other evidence, police collected a cigarette butt that carried Lobia's DNA, prosecutors said. Crewmembers also testified that they recognized his distinctive dolphin-shaped necklace from the hijacking. 

Last year, Lobia was charged a second time for the attack on the BBC Caribbean. This month, the district court in Rotterdam found him guilty and sentenced him to another three years in prison. This was less than the 5.5 years that Dutch prosecutors requested, in part because the judge took Lobia's original motive - poverty - into account.