Somali pirates have abandoned a hijacked Emirati dhow in the Arabian Sea after failing to use it to capture other vessels, according to security officials in Somalia's semi-autonomous Puntland region. The Fahad-4, a dhow carrying a cargo of lemons, was seized in late April by an 11-member pirate group approximately 10 nautical miles off the northeastern Somali coastal town of Dhinowda. The pirates, who set out from waters near the port of Garacad — roughly 600 kilometres north of the capital Mogadishu — commandeered the vessel as a mothership to launch further attacks on passing ships. They abandoned it on 4 May, after running short of supplies and finding that heightened vigilance among vessels navigating Somali waters had frustrated their plans.

The fate of the Fahad-4's crew remains unclear, and Somali authorities have yet to issue an official statement on the vessel's status. The episode is part of a sharp and worrying upturn in piracy off Somalia's coast, a stretch of ocean that forms part of one of the world's busiest maritime corridors. The Joint Maritime Information Centre (JMIC), a multinational body monitoring Indian Ocean security, has raised its piracy threat level to "severe" following a string of recent attacks. Several seized vessels remain under pirate control, including the Barbadian-flagged tanker Honour 25, hijacked off Puntland on 21 April, and the Syrian-flagged Sward. A Togo-flagged petrol tanker, the Eureka, was also seized off the coast of Yemen on 2 May and steered towards Somali shores.

Analysts point to a convergence of geopolitical factors that has created new openings for Somali pirate networks, which are organised largely around clan structures in the Puntland region. Since 2023, international naval patrols that previously suppressed piracy in these waters have been diverted northward to counter attacks by Yemen's Houthi movement in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, the narrow passage connecting the Gulf of Aden with the Red Sea. More recently, the conflict between Iran and the United States and Israel has drawn further naval attention toward the Strait of Hormuz, the critical Persian Gulf chokepoint. Omar Mahmood, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, describes the current surge as opportunistic: pirates who never fully disappeared are now exploiting the distraction of global maritime security resources.

Rising fuel prices linked to the Iran conflict have also reportedly made tankers more attractive targets, as their cargoes become more valuable. Somali authorities, for their part, have limited capacity to respond — their security forces are already heavily stretched combating the jihadist groups al-Shabaab and Islamic State, which remain active in the country. Piracy off Somalia peaked around 2011, when it was estimated to cost the global economy up to $18 billion annually according to the World Bank, before being substantially reduced by coordinated international naval operations. The identity of the groups behind the current wave of attacks remains unclear, though past hijackings have involved local fishermen-turned-pirates as well as armed groups with links to extremist organisations.