If his timbers are shivering, he’s sure not showing it.
The lone surviving Somali pirate of the four who hijacked the Maersk Alabama arrived in New York from Africa yesterday, smiling for a flurry of camera lights.
Scrawny teen brigand Abduhl Wal-i-Musi was walked into 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan by a dozen FBI agents at 11 p.m.
He was front-cuffed and chained to the agents. At first, he was stern-faced, before flashing a smile for the photographers.
His blue, rainproof jumpsuit hung baggy on his thin frame — all in one piece, including the footies, like a child’s pajamas.
He didn’t answer questions.
Wal-i-Musi is expected to face a federal magistrate in Manhattan by this afternoon, according to official sources.
There, he will likely learn he faces kidnapping and other charges carrying a maximum of life in prison, the sources said.
He has a lawyer with the help of the Minneapolis-based Somali Justice Advocacy Center, its director, Omar Jamal, said today.
Jamal says Muse, whose parents say is 16, does not speak English and is confused at his circumstances.
Wal-i-Musi was the hapless pirate in the lot — jumped, stabbed and tied up by his would-be captives in the early moments of the attack.
He escaped the fate of his fellow pirates — who were killed by Navy SEAL marksmen — only by agreeing to come aboard the Navy’s USS Bainbridge for treatment of a stab wound to his hand.
As it turns out, the kidnapper-turned-captive told the Maersk Alabama’s navigation officer that he’d always dreamed of coming to the United States.
“I said, ‘Yeah, you’re probably going to go anyway — I don’t think you’re going to need my help,’ ” the officer, Ken Quinn, told CNN Radio.
“I’m mad because, you know, I could have been dead right now,” Quinn said. “But at the same time, he’s just a little skinny guy from Somalia where they’re all starving and stuff.”
Wal-i-Musi’s passage from the seas 350 miles off Somalia to Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he spent last night, wasn’t the pleasure trip he’d hoped for.
He boarded the Bainbridge shortly before the SEALS rescued hostage Capt. Richard Phillips by taking out the buccaneer’s three comrades.
Wal-i-Musi was then shipped to Djibouti, where the US military handed him over to federal authorities, and flown in an FBI plane to Stewart Airport in upstate Newburgh, where he landed at 8:30 last night. With Post Wire Services