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KUALA LUMPUR: Pirates attacks in the South China Sea are increasing and Malaysia has urged the bordering nations to work together to fight the threat, reports said Monday.
"Piracy there is not conventional any more. Pirates feel that the countries don't patrol the sea enough," Defence Minister Zahid Hamidi was quoted as saying by the New Straits Times newspaper.
Zahid said that state-of-the art technology adopted by the navies of some littoral nations were useless without cooperation in combating the high-seas menace.
The International Maritime Bureau (IMB), a global maritime watchdog, said there were 22 attacks reported in the area for the first 11 months of this year compared to 17 for the whole of 2008.
"The cases are quite sporadic as once we report an attack to the authorities the numbers go down but they then slowly creep up again," said Noel Choong, head of the IMB's global piracy reporting centre.
He said the affected area lies in a triangle between Indonesia's Anambas Islands, Tioman Island off Malaysia and the eastern Singapore Straits.
The South China Sea is bordered by Brunei, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam.
"The challenge for neighbouring countries is to try to contain this piracy level while it is still small before it gets out of control like in Somalia," Choong told AFP.
Pirate attacks in the Malacca Strait, which was once the world's worst piracy hotspot, have declined sharply in recent years thanks to large-scale coordinated patrols involving Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.
More than 30 per cent of world trade, and half the world's oil shipments, pass through the busy waterway.
- AFP/yb
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