- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 22 April 2009 04.54 BST
Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse is led into a federal building by US authorities in New York. Photograph: Stephen Chernin/Getty Images
A Somali teenager who was involved in taking the American captain of a cargo ship hostage off the coast of Somalia has appeared in court in New York to face charges of piracy.
Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse will be the first person in more than a century to be tried in the US for piracy. He was captured and taken aboard the USS Bainbridge shortly before US snipers killed three of his fellow pirates holding Richard Phillips, captain of the Maersk Alabama.
Muse, who was the sole survivor among the group of pirates, was today charged as an adult after a prosecutor said he gave wildly varying ages for himself but finally admitted he was 18.
He was charged with several counts, including piracy under the law of nations. That charge carries a mandatory penalty of life in prison.
In addition to piracy, he was charged with conspiracy to seize a ship by force; discharging a firearm; aiding and abetting the discharge of a firearm during a conspiracy to seize a ship by force; conspiracy to commit hostage taking; and brandishing a firearm.
The raid on the cargo ship, which began on 8 April, was one of a growing number of piracy incidents off the Somali coast, which has disrupted international trade and cost millions of dollars in ransom money.
Figures from the International Maritime Bureau showed that incidents of piracy around the world had almost doubled in the first quarter of this year.
The surge was overwhelmingly caused by Somalia's anarchic political situation spilling out into the sea. Between January and March there were 102 attacks worldwide, compared with 53 in the same period in 2008, the London-based group said. Nearly two-thirds of this year's attacks – 61 in total – were within the Gulf of Aden and on the east coast of Somalia where Somali pirates operate.
US authorities decided to bring Muse to New York because he was arrested in international waters, so could be prosecuted in any country, and because the FBI in New York has acquired a specialism in dealing with east African legal affairs following the al-Qaida embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
Muse arrived in New York on Monday, handcuffed and with a bandage on his left hand over a wound incurred during a tussle on board the Maersk Alabama.
His prosecution raises difficult legal issues. Most problematic was the question of his age. His parents said that he was 16, an age that would categorise him as a child under federal law, and, in turn, set strict limits on the nature of his trial and length of any sentence. The US authorities claimed he was at least 18; if so, that would remove the restrictions.
US magistrate judge Andrew J Peck said today that Muse could be treated as an adult in US courts after a closed hearing during which he said Muse's father gave conflicting testimony about the ages of his children.
Omar Jamal, director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Centre, in Minnesota, in the US, said he was certain that the defendant was a minor. The group, which is giving Muse legal advice, will be pressing for dental tests to ascertain his precise age.
Jamal added that he was worried that a fair trial would not be possible. He said: "We have a real concern that given the media coverage since the beginning, the jury might already be prejudiced. What we have is a confused teenager, overnight thrown into the highest level of the criminal justice system in the United States out of a country where there's no law at all."
Muse's father, Abdiqadir Muse, claimed that his son had been tricked by older pirates into going along with them on their trips. "He just went with them without knowing what he was getting into," he said. Muse's mother, Adar Abdirahman Hassan, who appealed to the US president, Barack Obama, for her son to be released, added that he had been lured into piracy by "gangsters with money".
