The students defended the seized campus by throwing rocks, homemade rockets, and setting fire to the hijacked vehicles to use them as road blocks.
On those occasions that Puntland's tiny (and now defunct) coast guard has been given the authority by shipowners to liberate hijacked vessels, the pirates have tended to melt away, content to keep their lives rather than their prize.
Hopkins, the group's chairman, and the Danish ambassador, Thomas Winkler, who leads its legal committee, stressed there was no room for complacency, citing havens for pirates on the northern Somali coast and million-dollar ransoms to release hijacked ships and crews that continue to attract young men to piracy.
In that same year the European Community (EC) agreed to boycott the airline of any country that either harboured hijackers or refused to release hijacked aircraft.
No one in Washington seriously contends that the President or any of his senior advisers had any reason to suspect that terrorists were about to fly hijacked airplanes into buildings.
Not having a leader and not having it be able to be hijacked, politically, I think, is key to the leaderless organization of it all, and I hope it continues.
Boeing, for example, is studying whether sensors designed to track enemy missiles could be used to identify hijacked airliners.
Most shipping companies, in turn, opt to pay the expensive ransoms demanded by Somali pirates to release hijacked ships rather than engage in confrontations.
The director of the Pentagon memorial project said none of the designs by the finalists made reference to the attack on the World Trade Center or to the hijacked jet that crashed in Shanksville, Pa.
