KUALA LUMPUR - PIRATE gangs in the Straits of Malacca can be 'struck down' within the next five years if the current aggressive pace of enforcement is maintained, a senior Malaysian maritime security official told Reuters.

Abdul Rahim Hussein from Malaysia's National Security Council said intelligence and enforcement cooperation between the littoral states of Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore is now 'at a new peak", which has led to a marked decline in piracy incidents.

Mr Rahim, undersecretary of maritime security policy, said there had been no incidents in the Straits this year, a marked drop from 2004 which recorded 38 piracy attacks in the shipping channel that carries a quarter of the world's traded goods.

The three littoral states have aggressively increased patrols and cooperation since July 2005.

'Since then we have been able to jointly hunt down a number of known gangs operating in the area who were targeting ships transiting the Straits ... these gangs no longer have sanctuary,' he said while attending a conference on piracy in the Malaysian capital.

'If we can maintain an incident free area for the next five years then the criminal gangs will no longer be able to resurface,' he said in an interview late on Monday.

The success in the Straits of Malacca stands in sharp contrast to rising piracy in the Gulf of Aden, which a senior UN official told Reuters would not be solved until Somalia was a functioning state.

Somali pirates have mounted 81 attacks between Jan 1 and April 20, according to data from the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), compared with 115 for all of 2008.

The 1998 Asian financial crisis and a separatist struggle in the Indonesian province of Aceh resulted in major hardships and displacement of people in the region, contributing factors fuelling the rise of piracy incidents in the Straits, said Mr Rahim.

'There are now some migrants who are unemployed, and a number may engage in crime out of desperation... but the situation today is still better compared to after the 1998 crisis, and Indonesia is still projected to (show) growth, which is a good sign,' he said. -- REUTERS