that number is crap, because they'd all be bottlenecked at the Suez Canal, in or out. 16000 ships/day is one every five seconds.
i am deeply dsylexic - it might well have been 1600/day
i don't think all that traffic is necessarily going through the canal - the tanker that recently made the news was going around the cape and was way out at sea - it doesn't sound like the badguys are exactly flying the jolly roger either, but pose as fisherman and hell, probably are actually fishing, right up until the locate a juicy, unprotected target