A Chinese fishing vessel off the Puntland coast, Somalia, was hijacked by pirates in the afternoon on New Year’s Day.

The ship named Liao Dong Yu 578 was attacked off the coast of Bandarbeyla by pirates intending to release the crew members in exchange for ransom.

Many pirate groups in the area use such fishing vessels as motherships to launch attacks on bigger merchant ships passing through the region’s waters, especially in the Indian Ocean.

The ship in question is particularly unlucky, as this is its second hijacking. It was earlier captured off Puntland in November 2024 and was released in January 2025 after a ransom of 2 million dollars was paid to the pirates.

The hijacking incident was confirmed by the European Union’s Naval Force.

Dave Harvilicz, Deputy Secretary for Cyber, Infrastructure, Risk and Resilience Policies at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said that the vessel was doing illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing off Somalia.

It caught the previous yellowfin tuna, whose stocks are being rapidly depleted. He added that due to continuous fishing by Chinese and other foreign fleets, Somalia’s yellowfin tuna stocks are facing a collapse that would affect the regional shipping economy and also threaten food security.

Illegal and Unreported fishing costs Somalia around 300 million dollars annually and also threatens the livelihoods of 90,000 local fishermen.

According to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, regional governments in Puntland function with a semi-autonomous strucutre nd issue their own fishing licences to Chinese operators, which complicates fisheries management.