A Somali teenager arrived to face what are believed to be the first piracy charges in the United States in more than a century, smiling but saying nothing as he was led into a federal building under heavy guard.
    
Abduhl Wali-i-Musi, the sole surviving Somali pirate from the hostage-taking of an American ship captain, was to appear in a courtroom Tuesday on what were expected to be piracy and hostage-taking charges.
    
Handcuffed with a chain wrapped around his waist and about a dozen federal agents surrounding him, the slight teen seemed poised as he passed through the glare of dozens of news cameras in a drenching rainstorm. His left hand was heavily bandaged from the wound he suffered during the skirmish on the cargo ship, the Maersk Alabama.
    
A law enforcement official familiar with the case said Wali-i-Musi was being charged under two obscure federal laws that deal with piracy and hostage taking. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the charges had not been announced.

“This hasn’t happened for 100 years in the United States,” Michael Passman, a Chicago lawyer who has studied piracy law since his days at Brooklyn Law School, told The New York Daily News.

Piracy is one of the only crimes for which there is universal jurisdiction. It means any country that captures a pirate can seek to prosecute them under that nation’s piracy laws. In the United States, criminal prosecution of piracy is authorized in the U.S. Constitution, Art. I Sec. 8 cl. 10.

The suspect was taken aboard a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Bainbridge, shortly before Navy SEAL snipers killed three of his colleagues who had held Maersk Alabama Capt. Richard Phillips hostage.

Wali-I-Musi told the Maersk Alabama’s navigation officer that he’d always dreamed of coming to the United States.

“I said, ‘Yeah, you’re probably going to go anyway — I don’t think you’re going to need my help,’ ” the officer, Ken Quinn, told CNN Radio.

“I’m mad because, you know, I could have been dead right now,” Quinn said. “But at the same time, he’s just a little skinny guy from Somalia where they’re all starving and stuff.”

The teenager was flown from Africa to a New York airport on the same day that his mother appealed to President Barack Obama for his release. She said her son was coaxed into piracy by “gangsters with money.”

“I appeal to President Obama to pardon my teenager; I request him to release my son or at least allow me to see him and be with him during the trial,” Adar Abdirahman Hassan said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from her home in Galkayo town in Somalia.

The boy’s father, Abdiqadir Muse, said the pirates lied to his son, telling him they were going to get money. The family is penniless, he said.

“He just went with them without knowing what he was getting into,” Muse said in a separate telephone interview with the AP through an interpreter.

He also said it was his son’s first outing with the pirates after having been taken from his home about a week and a half before he surrendered at sea to U.S. officials.

The young pirate’s age and real name remained unclear. His parents said he is only 16; his father identified him as Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse. The law enforcement official said he is at least 18, meaning prosecutors will not have to take extra legal steps to try him in a U.S. court.
    
His worried family asked the Minneapolis-based Somali Justice Advocacy Center to help get him a lawyer, said the organization’s executive director, Omar Jamal.

“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,” Jamal said. Wali-i-Musi speaks no English, he said.

(Source: Associated Press / NBC New York)