Three Ships Boarded in Nine Days as Singapore Strait Robberies Hit 28 for 2024

Three merchant ships were boarded by robbers in the Singapore Strait in nine days, pushing reported incidents in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore to 28 this year and prompting an urgent security alert from the ReCAAP Information Sharing Centre.

One seafarer was injured in the attacks, which targeted two bulk carriers and a tanker between November 2 and November 10. ReCAAP issued its incident alert yesterday and warned that further incidents are possible in the heavily transited waterway.

The location pattern is precise — and that is the story. All three robberies occurred in the eastbound lane of the Traffic Separation Scheme, within roughly 3.2 nautical miles of each other. That clustering suggests a single operating area for the perpetrators and a predictable risk zone for shipmasters plotting their passage.

The timeline runs tight. The bulk carrier Star Calypso was boarded at 2125 hrs on November 2. The bulk carrier APJ Priti 2 was hit late on November 4. The tanker Salsa was attacked in the early hours of November 10.

What Was Stolen?

Engine spare parts were stolen from two of the three vessels. Nothing was reported missing from the third. One crewmember sustained injuries during the attacks.

The nature of the theft matters for operators. Spare-parts robbery at sea is low-value cargo crime, not cargo hijacking, but it forces deviation, delays and incident reporting costs that land squarely on owners and their hull insurers. For crew, any boarding carries injury risk, as this sequence proved.

The tolling of the strait continues regardless. The Singapore Strait carries a large share of global seaborne trade, and eastbound lane transits are dense, slow and predictable — conditions that make boarding attempts easier.

What Is ReCAAP Asking For?

The Information Sharing Centre has laid out specific asks for the three littoral states:

• Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore should intensify patrols and surveillance in the affected corridor.
• The three countries should improve coordination and share intelligence to identify and arrest those responsible.
• Shipmasters should maintain heightened vigilance, particularly during darkness, when the November 2 boarding occurred.
• Vessels should strengthen preventive measures, including CCTV coverage of potential boarding locations.
• Ships should report suspicious activity immediately and use ReCAAP's digital reporting and incident mapping systems when assessing voyage risks.

What Does This Mean for Operators?

For carriers and tramp operators on Asia-bound routes, the practical consequence is a raised watch-keeping burden through the eastbound lane. Night transits carry elevated risk, and the recommended mitigations — extra lookouts, lit deck perimeters, CCTV trained on boarding points — cost hours and staffing rather than money.

For forwarders and cargo interests, the incidents are unlikely to disrupt schedules on their own. Robberies of this type rarely force port diversions. But the injury to a crewmember and the 28-incident year-to-date count will keep war-risk and hull underwriters watching the strait, and repeated clustering in a single lane segment typically triggers higher scrutiny of operators passing through without documented precautions.

For regional authorities, the pressure is now explicit. ReCAAP's call for joint patrols, better coordination and shared intelligence amounts to a public statement that current surveillance has not deterred the attackers, who returned to the same 3.2-mile stretch of the eastbound lane three times in nine days.

With the alert fresh and the year's count at 28, shipmasters transiting the Singapore Strait in the coming weeks should expect the risk advisory to stand — and should treat dark-hours transits of the eastbound lane as the exposure ReCAAP says it is.