The first ever European trial of suspected Somali pirates opened in the Netherlands Tuesday with five men denying they attempted to hijack a cargo ship with guns and rockets.

"I committed no crime. I did not attack anyone. I did not do anything," Abdirisaq Abdulahi Hirsi, 33, told the Rotterdam district court, echoing his four co-accused who have all spent over a year in a Dutch jail.

"I am the victim here," added Sayid Ali Garaar, 39. "They destroyed my boat and put my life in danger."

Alongside Farah Ahmed Yusuf, 25, Jama Mohamed Samatar, 45, and Osman Musse Farah, 32, the men were detained in the Gulf of Aden in January last year.

A Danish frigate intercepted their high-speed boat as they prepared to board the Dutch Antilles-flagged Samanyolu after attacking it with automatic weapons and rockets, according to the prosecution.

The suspects, facing jail terms of up to 12 years, greeted their lawyers with big smiles as they entered the dock, watched by a heavy police contingent and dozens of local and international media.

"Today, your trial begins in earnest," presiding judge Jan Willem Klein Wolterink told the group.

Lawyer Haroon Raza, for Farah, asked for a further postponement of the case saying several witnesses - sailors who had been on board the Samanyolu - had not yet been interviewed as they were away at sea.

But the request was denied after several of his co-accused objected to a further delay.

Suspects miss family
"If our children are hungry, who is responsible?" an emotional and animated Garaar told the court. "I don't know who is still alive and who has died."

"You sleep in your house while I have no country, no family. I have nothing," he told judge Wolterink of life in his lawless homeland in the Horn of Africa.

Added Samatar: "I have problems with being in prison. My family finds itself in a wretched situation."

The Netherlands issued European arrest warrants for the five men three weeks after their arrest on January 2 last year, and they were flown on a military plane from Bahrain the following month to the Netherlands, where they have been in custody ever since.

The trial is expected to last five days and judgment is set to be handed down on June 16, Vincent de Winkel, a spokesman for the Rotterdam court, said.

According to the London-based International Maritime Bureau, which monitors maritime crime, pirates attempted 215 attacks on merchant ships off the Somali coast in 2009.

Last Tuesday, a Yemeni court sentenced six Somali pirates to death and jailed six others for 10 years each for hijacking a Yemeni oil tanker and killing two cabin crew in April last year.

source: ANP/AFP