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'Prince of Mercenaries' who wreaked havoc in Iraq turns up in Somalia
Erik Prince, the American founder of the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, has cropped up at the center of a controversial scheme to establish a new mercenary force to crack down on piracy and terrorism in the war-torn East African country of Somalia.
The project, which emerged yesterday when an intelligence report was leaked to media in the United States, requires Mr Prince to help train a private army of 2,000 Somali troops that will be loyal to the country's United Nations-backed government. Several neighboring states, including the United Arab Emirates, will pay the bills.
Prince is working in Somalia alongside Saracen International, a murky South African firm which is run by a former officer from the Civil Co-operation Bureau, an apartheid-era force notorious for killing opponents of the white minority government.
News of his latest project has alarmed, though hardly surprised, critics of Blackwater. The firm made hundreds of millions of dollars from the "war on terror", but was severely tarnished by a string of incidents in post-invasion Iraq, in which its employees were accused of committing dozens of unlawful killings.
Prince, a 41-year-old former US Navy Seal with links to the Bush administration, subsequently rebranded the company "Xe Services" and sold his stake in it. But he remains entangled in a string of lawsuits pertaining to the alleged recklessness of the firm.
For most of the past year, he has been living in Abu Dhabi, where he has close relations with the government and feels better positioned to dodge lawsuits. In an interview with a men's magazine, he recently declared that the UAE's opaque legal system will make it "harder for the jackals to get my money".