Omar Jamal, a Somali community organiser, says his temper finally snapped towards the end of an interminable series of negotiations in the longest-running of the spate of ship hijackings in and around the Gulf of Aden.

After many weeks of phone calls aimed at cajoling a group of kidnappers into releasing the Nigerian tug Yenagoa Ocean and its 10 sailors, he issued a stark ultimatum. “I said: ‘Give me the crew of the ship alive or give me the dead bodies,’ ” he recalls. “That seemed to work.”