Washington ? U.S. officials have found no direct ties between East African pirates and terrorist groups but continue to search for signs of links between the two factions in the wake of the Indian Ocean hostage incident.

It was not clear whether officials were scrutinizing the Somali pirates who boarded the Maersk Alabama on Tuesday and fled in a lifeboat after taking hostage the cargo ship’s captain.

Military and counterterrorism officials say that in the transient world of Somalia’s combative coastal dwellers, a Somali clansman can be a fisherman one day, a pirate the next, and a weapons trafficker the following day.

“If you look at the clan structure or the tribes — to think that there may not be linkages probably is a bit naive,” Army Gen. William “Kip” Ward, head of the Pentagon’s Africa Command, said in an interview Thursday.

Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, warned that some of the money from piracy could make its way into the hands of extremists.

But the complicated clan structure and Somalia’s ungoverned black market have made it difficult to trace the cash transactions.