Sometime in the mid-1990s, there was a report of an Australian
couple who made an attempt to sail back from Singapore to
Darwin.
Passing through some Indonesian waters, they were stopped by a
naval craft that had all appearance of belonging to the military,
but with some efforts made to conceal its identification.
The Australian man was shot dead, and the woman was raped and left
for dead, their belongings were robbed.
Single handedly, the Australian woman managed to sail the Yatch to
the nearest island port, and when arriving at the jetty, she
thought that the shape and outline of a naval craft looked quite
familiar.
So too, were some of the personnel on board the vessel.
She was too scared to inform the local authorities of her finding,
and did not speak out while being attended at the local Indonesian
hospital until she was flown back home to Darwin, Australia.
During the 1960s and until the mid-1980s rumors abound about the
pirate roles played by the poorly paid personnel from the
Indonesian Navy.
The same was said of the piracy situation, during the Boat Peoples
crisis in the aftermath of the Vietnam War in 1974, when the
Vietnamese refugees were robbed, raped and murdered by the
hundreds, with most the pirates being Thai fishermen operating in
the South-China Sea to intercept those rich Vietnamese escaping
Vietnam with gold items.
Some of the Vietnamese girls and women were kidnapped and forced
into prostitution in Thailand, or sold to the Japanese Yakuza meat
market.
One famous sea piracy happened around 2000 2001, when a Singapore
registered vessel was hijacked by a PRC Naval Patrol Boat, in the
middle of the South-China Sea, under the pretext of the Singapore
vessel of smuggling.
The vessel was subsequently traced to a sea port in Southern China,
with its name changed, crews were detained, and the cargo
sold.
