AMERICA'S best-known mercenary is helping to train thousands of soldiers to strengthen Government forces in the Somali civil war and confront pirates operating off the Horn of Africa, according to Western officials and the African Union.
Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of the Blackwater private security company, is a prime mover behind secret contracts to train two 1,000-strong anti-piracy forces, one of which would also take on the al-Shabaab movement, which has links to al-Qa'ida in the lawless northern Somali province of Puntland, officials say.
Mr Prince moved his base of operations to Abu Dhabi last year after Blackwater staff faced a series of criminal and media investigations into the killing of 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007. The company has been renamed Xe Services and he is in the process of selling his stake in it for a reported $US200million.
His appetite for risk and reward in the world's most dangerous countries appears to be unaffected, however. According to a recent African Union report Mr Prince provided the seed money for an effort by the separate South African-based Saracen International security company to win contracts to protect Somali officials in Mogadishu, where the Government controls only a small part of the city.
Saracen has confirmed that it signed a contract with the Somali Government last March. By that time Mr Prince had already spent two years seeking a role in the struggle against piracy in the busy shipping lanes off the Somali coast - a struggle in which governments have been quick to deploy naval assets but reluctant to confront the pirates on Somali territory.
In 2008 Mr Prince paid for the refurbishment of a 56-metre oceanographic vessel as a pirate-hunting ship, with unmanned spotter planes and .50 calibre machineguns. Since Saracen's involvement in the Somali civil war became known, the UN has launched an investigation into whether its activities breach an international embargo on shipping arms to the region, and the US State Department has expressed "concern about the lack of transparency" on the role of the company.
Somali officials say that Saracen's activities in their country are being funded by an unnamed Middle Eastern country. A recent intelligence report seen by The New York Times and endorsed by Western security officials names the United Arab Emirates as the country and Mr Prince as a participant.
Saracen's chief operating officer, Lafras Luitingh, was a founder of Executive Outcomes, the South African mercenary force that courted controversy throughout the 1990s by involving itself in conflicts from Sierra Leone to Papua New Guinea. He refused to comment on Mr Prince's alleged involvement in his Somali operations this week, but a spokesman said: "It is well known that [Mr Prince] has long been interested in helping Somalia overcome the scourge of piracy. To that end, he has at times provided advice to many different anti-piracy efforts."
Mr Prince is a former US Navy Seal who founded Blackwater in 1997 and won US Government security contracts worth an estimated $US900million over the next decade.In Kabul, Blackwater personnel have been accused of using US taxpayers' money for ransacking weapons stores intended for Afghan security forces.
Under its new name the company has agreed to pay a $US42million fine for violating US rules on arms exports to Afghanistan.