Worldwide piracy trending down with a Bangladesh exception

Reported here:

Piracy attacks against ships worldwide has dropped 15 percent in the first nine months of 2006 to 174 cases from 205 in the same period last year, according to a report released Wednesday by the London-based International Maritime Bureau.

"The reduction in attacks is welcome. Credit for this must go to the law enforcement agencies responding to the attacks in high-risk areas. This would not have been possible without focused information on the numbers, types of attacks and trends in these areas provided by the IMB Piracy Reporting Center," IMB director Capt. Pottengal Mukundan said in a press statement.

The IMB's Piracy Reporting Center is based in Kuala Lumpur.

Bucking the global trend, however, was Bangladesh, which saw a 136 percent spike in piracy attacks in the January-September period, from 14 last year to 33 this year, the IMB said.

Most of the attacks took place in and around the port of Chittagong, which the IMB has now given the title of the "world's most dangerous port."

Also worth noting is that the vast majority of incidents are sneak aboard robberies - not the dramatic at sea attacks seen off Somalia...

Piracy incident maps from here.