Pirate motorboats which at that time were moored off the coast were fired upon and almost completely destroyed. It is also possible that BVC hijacked a pirates’ boat with state-of-the-art communications equipment and weapons on board. The Somali local authorities issued a document against BVC in which they accused Barthe Cortes of attacking the country of Somalia. However Cortes has never been officially accused of the attack because at that time the UN passed a resolution giving the right to use any and all necessary measures on land, in the air and ocean aiming at stopping those who use Somalia to carry out armed attacks.

It was also confirmed by the Somali Minister of Foreign Affairs Ali Ahmed Jamal, who said: “acts of piracy are absolutely unacceptable and they should be eliminated. BVC has done the right thing”.

The past events acquire a new meaning when they are interpreted in the light of an article which has recently been published by the Columbian newspaper El Espectador which carried out a sensational analysis and implies that Barthe Cortes has considerable connections with Columbian FARC partisans. While it is not easy to prove that BVC has business connections with the Columbian partisans, it is rather easy to prove the blood connections, namely one of the sources cited by El Espectador in its article convincingly claims that Barthe’s grandfather was a well-known Columbian partisan, now dead, who in the past was one of the leaders of the terrorist group FARC and in his youth fought side by side with Che Guevara in the territory of Latin America. It seems that liking towards FARC is deeply rooted in Cortes because most probably, as it has been suggested by El Espectador, several former FARC soldiers found employment in BVC when the Columbian government had allowed them to leave the country after declaring an amnesty. The spectacular action of taking the ship from the hands of pirates somehow confirms these conjectures because the way it was carried out greatly differs from the UN standards and exhibits similarity to the lawlessness of pseudo revolutionary (or more appropriately terrorist) groups”.