sea in one of the driest places imaginable, the desert prison of Mandera in Somaliland.

One of only a handful of self confessed pirates, he has been sentenced to life in this sand-blasted colonial fort built by the British to house an earlier generation of dissenters, rebels and common criminals.

Caught red handed as he prepared to launch attacks into the Gulf of Aden from the port of Berbera he is devoid of the usual need for evasion. His account of how and why he came to the northern breakaway state is startlingly direct.

“I came here from a village called Eyl,” the port at the heart of the piracy surge off Somalia. “I came here to kidnap commercial ships from the waters off Berbera.

Sitting in a room crowded with uniformedI would like to receive morning headlines Monday - Friday plus breaking news alerts by email Update newsletter preferences

He did not begin life, as so many Somali pirates have claimed, as a fishermen on the immense coastline that stretches around the Horn. Ismail grew up in Mogadishu, the capital of newly independent Somalia, relinquished by Italy after its defeat in World War II.

“I became a mechanic, I could fix anything,” he says in a matter of fact tone.

He came to the coast as a young man and ran his own workshop in Bossasso, the centre of Puntland, another breakaway province in a fractured country.

Once there he spied an opportunity that many other young Somalis were just waking up to. The mainstay of the Somali economy had long been