The French navy on Friday captured six pirates who had hijacked a luxury yacht off the coast of Somalia, after helping the boat’s owners pay a ransom for the crew’s release.
The crew of 30, including 22 French nationals, were freed from their seven-day ordeal when CMA CGM, the owners of the Ponant, handed over an unspecified ransom, part of which was later recovered.
A French Gazelle helicopter tracked and detained half of the pirate gang about an hour later as they sought to make their getaway on dry land.
The six Somalis were on Friday night being held on a French warship. Officials said they would be prosecuted under French law.
President Nicolas Sarkozy used the peaceful end to the incident to press for an international clampdown on maritime piracy, particularly in three notorious blackspots: the Horn of Africa, the Gulf of Guinea to the west of the continent and the straits of Malacca between Indonesia and Malaysia.
French diplomats will next week seek UN approval for a two-pronged plan under which countries susceptible to pirate attacks will agree to open their territorial waters to foreign naval forces in hot pursuit of pirates, and leading maritime nations, including France, Britain and the US, will agree to step up their patrols of these areas.
The Somali government had given France permission to pursue the Ponant pirates on to Somali territory, said Jean-David Levitte, Mr Sarkozy’s chief diplomatic adviser.
Mr Levitte added that piracy was becoming “a real threat to international security”, with 3,000 hostages taken across the world in the past 10 years. Somali pirates were known to operate up to 850km off the Somali coast, he said.
French military chiefs insisted there was no contradiction between Mr Sarkozy’s call for an international clampdown on maritime piracy and the government’s help in paying a ransom. Mr Sarkozy’s priority had been the safe release of all the crew and a desire to ensure that the act “did not go unpunished”.
“Strictly no public money was handed over,” said General Jean-Louis Georgelin, the chief of the defence staff, who later added that “some interesting bags” containing some of the cash had been recovered with the captured pirates.
The Ponant, a three-masted sailing yacht with no passengers aboard, was captured on April 4, and from Sunday had been moored about a mile off the southern coast of the Somali region of Puntland.
The French navy deployed two warships to the area and parachuted in a unit of special forces to prepare for a possible storming of the yacht.
In the end, the crew of the Ponant were released without a shot being fired, although a French navy helicopter did fire on the vehicle containing the fleeing pirates, officials said.
