Malaysia said today it is open to cooperation with the United States, Australia and Japan to combat piracy in the Malacca Straits, provided territorial rights are retained.

"We do not rule out cooperation with the US, Australia and Japan in capacity-building or looking at more effective ways to patrol," Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar said.

However, if there was to be any cooperation with foreign countries, it must not jeopardise the territorial rights and sovereignty of the littoral states, he was quoted as saying by the official Bernama news agency.

"We are capable of patrolling the area ourselves and by cooperating with the littoral states Indonesia and Singapore. We already have coordinated patrols, though not joint patrols," he added.

"We do not want Malacca Strait to be seen as a dangerous area and prone to piracy because the threat is not that bad and we do not want shipping companies to set up their own security teams as this would create a dangerous situation," he said.

Talks to begin tomorrow

He was speaking to reporters ahead of a day of talks tomorrow between the three foreign ministers of Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore about the waterway on Indonesia's Batam island.

After years of resistance to other nations becoming heavily involved in security there, deputy premier Najib Razak said in May that nations with a commercial stake in the waterway such as the United States and Japan would be asked to help in "capacity building".

The Malacca Strait is one of the world's most important stretches of water, with 50,000 ships carrying about one-third of the globe's trade passing through it each year.

However the strait, 960 kilometres long and 1.2 kilometres wide at its narrowest point, is notoriously vulnerable to pirate attacks and governments in the region also believe it is a tempting target for terrorists.