"I was nervous about whether I would be extorted for money, or held up, or kidnapped or what not." The only person he was counting on was a local journalist he had spoken with on the phone but had never met, and whose father had just been elected the president of Puntland, a semiautonomous pirate-infested region in northern Somalia where piracy originated. and took pity on me," he said with a chuckle. "My original plan, before I thought about it for a minute, was to just go on my own and kind of stumble onto a pirate group and hope that they thought I was a little crazy. "I always intended to break into journalism by going abroad and just writing freelance," Bahadur said in an interview with The Canadian Press. What he learned and witnessed during the three months he lived among the Somali pirates is documented in his book, "The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World," that is being released in Canada and the United States on Tuesday. TORONTO - Jay Bahadur admits his parents probably wanted him to move out of their house and "do his own thing." But hanging out with pirates in the world's most dangerous country was not exactly what they had in mind.Įager to break into journalism, the 27-year-old Toronto native, who had never been to Africa, made some phone calls, got in touch with some local journalists, and in January 2009 left his parent's home in Chicago and hopped on a plane to Somalia.
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