July 20, 2015 — “Brace yourself.” This was the subject line of an email I received from a source at Interpol.

Attached was a video showing the gruesome killing of at least four unarmed men floating in the ocean. The video was the beginning of a story I wrote about violence on the high seas, part of a series called The Outlaw Ocean.

The video, which had been discovered on a cellphone left in the back of a taxi in Fiji, shows four large fishing ships circling the men in the water, clinging to what looked like the wreckage of a wooden boat. One by one, the four men are shot in view of dozens of witnesses. At the end of the video the men who filmed the incident pose for selfies.

It seemed amazing to me that in an era of drones and GPS, of big data and crowdsourcing, virtually nothing was known about these killings — not the perpetrators nor the victims, much less the location, timing or motives.

Maritime security experts I spoke to about the video had the same basic response: Violence at sea is far more prevalent than most people realize, and most of it looks nothing like the movie “Captain Phillips.”

Small cargo and fishing vessels (not huge Western-owned container ships) are the usual targets of violent attack. Assaults are most common along the border between national and international waters, where poachers roam and fishing competition is fiercest. Coastal Nigeria, the Bay of Bengal and the waters near Indonesia are said to be especially perilous.

Read the full story at the New York Times