The European Union (EU) naval force protecting shipping off Somalia said on Friday that the number of pirate ships operating between the Seychelles and the Somali coast has skyrocketed in the last three months.

"This season, between February and May, we have seen a huge surge in the number of vessels put to sea to conduct pirate acts," Rear Admiral Peter Hudson of the EU Naval Force Somalia Operation told reporters.

The EU force, along with NATO and others, has interrupted and dismantled over 60 pirate groups and processed roughly 400 suspected pirates in the last 12 weeks alone -- three times the number of piracy groups recorded last year, the admiral said.

The main task of EU Navfor's Operation Atalanta is to escort merchant vessels carrying World Food Program (WFP) humanitarian aid and to protect vulnerable ships in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean.

Pirates are being increasingly caught further from the Horn of Africa, sometimes as far 1,500 kilometers away, which is far nearer to India than it is to Africa, said Hudson.

Meanwhile, the Gulf of Aden, which is a strategic artery for shipping, has seen a "significant" dip in piracy-related acts, said Hudson, noting the number of attacks is down from about 20 a month to around four or five.

"Between the summer of 2009 and today, we have affected a modicum of change," he said. "The number of vessels seized is considerably lower in the Gulf of Aden area."

Next week, the United Nations will co-host with Turkey a conference to discuss a range of security issues that threaten Somalia's stability, including piracy. A worse case scenario suggests that sea piracy could evolve into maritime terrorism if not properly dealt with by the international community.

A number of questions remain about how to detain and prosecute pirates, which often operate in international waters. Last month, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution calling for an international legal system to try pirates. It also urged all countries to criminalize piracy under their domestic law.

Many Somalis have maintained that piracy will not go away until the root cause is addressed. For years, unauthorized fishing vessels have harvested tons of fish from Somalia's waters, which has been governed by a weak, if not nonexistent, Transitional Federal Government (TFG).

But Hudson told reporters that linking today's piracy to illegal fishing is "slightly tenuous" as there is "very little fishing activity" near the coast of Somalia, whether it be from the big international fishing countries, like Japan, or subsistence fishing from local communities.

If a fishing vessel is spotted by EU Navfor's Operation, a report is sent to a coordination cell in Brussels, Belgium, and then passed on to the TFG, said Hudson, adding that the number of reports sent in the past few months has been limited.

"There are a lot of pirates in the region and there aren't many fishing vessels, so the number of reports is not great and it's only something we've started doing in the last couple of months," he said. "It's an indicator of the reassurance that we want to give of the EU to the TFG of what's happening in the waters off their coast so they can formulate and get a truer picture of events on the high seas."