Kidnapped British sailors situation grows uglier - update

by Ecoterra/Sail-World Cruising on 3 Nov 2009 Reports from Somalia about the situation of the kidnapped sailors Paul and Rachel Chandlers are conflicting. Even where they are being held is now uncertain, whether on land or back on a container ship. Some news from the murky world that is Somalia today suggest that the Somali pirates who kidnapped the couple were involved in a gun-battle with rival militia over plans to transfer the couple to Islamic extremists.

One faction of the gang holding the Chandlers, from Tunbridge Wells, Kent, wanted to hand them over to local Islamists believed to be linked to radical jihadists fighting Somalia’s Western-backed government. The report, by one Mike Pflanz for the Daily Telegraph, went on to relate that the Chandlers were not injured during Monday’s clashes.

Other reports suggest that the pirate gang who kidnapped the couple are now splitting over whether to continue to demand a ransom, or to swap the Chandlers for seven pirates recently arrested by Navy ships in the area.

Each of the main news agencies, Associated Press(AP), Agence France Press (AFP) and Bloomberg have slightly varying stories as to the events which have taken place.

'We did not want the pirates to use our territory to hold hostages or hand them over to another group,' Hussein Mohamed Kahiye, a clan elder, told The Associated Press in Mogadishu.

He said fighters allied to his clan linked with a moderate Islamic militia to fight back against the pirates’ plan to transfer the Chandlers to another, more radical Islamist group.

If the Chandlers were to be given to Islamist extremists, their plight would have become political rather than simply commercial. Two journalists from Australia and Canada have been held by the Islamists for more than a year as ransom negotiations have broken down.

However a spokesman for the pirates, Shakir, denied that the report that there had already been a firefight over control of the Chandlers. However, he confirmed that the two British hostages had been taken inland to Bahdo (or Baxdo), a town 125-miles northeast of the notorious pirate haven of Haradheere. He said that more pirates were making their way to Bahdo to reinforce those holding the hostages.

'Armed pirates are flowing into Bahdo to defend against any Islamists’ attack,' he said. A local elder, Abdullahi Said, said attempts were underway to mediate between the pirates and the Islamists in the hope of preventing any armed clashes.

The pirates believe the Chandlers to be valuable hostages. In a phone call to the BBC last week, one pirate claiming to speak for the gang holding them demanded a ransom of $7m. The British government has said it will not pay any ransom.

Other reports suggested the pirates might want to organise a prisoner exchange, swapping the Chandlers for a group of pirates arrested by a European Union warship on anti-piracy patrol off the Somali coast.

According to Pflanz none of the pirate gangs, who simply want ransom money, are closely linked to al Shabaab, the radical jihadists who control much of the south of Somalia and who are fighting to overthrow the weak government.

Analyst Tristan McConnell writes that the Islamists who hold sway across much of Somalia do not have a comforting reputation. One of the main insurgent groups fighting the Government in Mogadishu is al-Shabaab, a group with self-professed links to al-Qaeda and global jihad. Its fight against African Union forces and the Western-backed Government has attracted fighters from Britain, the US and Pakistan.

The other main group is only a little less malevolent. Hizb al-Islam is led by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a terrorist wanted by the US. The group’s ideology is more nationalistic, with jihad seen as a means to unite all Somali people under one flag, but it is scarcely less extreme.

Often allied against the Government, the two groups turned their guns on each other this year over who should hold a pair of French intelligence agents who had been kidnapped in Mogadishu.In the past, hostages could wait for months while employers or governments negotiated over ransoms, with pirates regarding them as assets and treating them relatively well. But whichever group of militants is headed for the Chandlers, it is far less likely to be interested in looking after them.

And the ordeal doesn’t necessarily end with the delivery of a ransom. Last year, when sacks of dollar bills were parachuted in to pirates in exchange for a ship and her crew, gun battles erupted between rival groups determined to muscle in on the spoils.

A multinational force of warships has done little to deter the pirates whose attacks are increasingly frequent and brazen. There have been at least 163 attacks so far in 2009, 47 of which were successful. At least eight ships are being held and well over 150 crew.

Figures released by the International Maritime Bureau showed pirate attacks worldwide in 2009 have already exceeded the total number for 2008 which was a record year for piracy. The majority of the attacks are attributed to Somali pirates.

........................

Previous stories

01 November, 2009: Somali pirates have now moved the abducted cruising sailors Paul and Rachel Chandler inland and away from a potential rescue attempt by Naval forces in the area.

The couple have been moved to Baxdo, an inland town along an extremely dusty and bumpy road about halfway between the coast and the main highway running through central Somalia.

The town lies in a zone of central Somalia loosely controlled by a clan-based local government.

In unconfirmed reports coming from Somalia, it appears that clashing clans are in disagreement about whether they should be ransoming the couple or exchanging them for arrested pirates.

..........................

Previous stories:

30th October, 2009: 10 KB Somali pirates who have kidnapped a British couple from Kent have issued a ransom demand of US$7m (£4.3m) in a call to the BBC. Paul and Rachel Chandler, aged 59 and 55, from Tunbridge Wells, were taken hostage by gunmen in the Indian Ocean in the early hours of 23 October. They had been travelling to Tanzania from the Seychelles and their yacht was later found in international waters.

The caller said: 'If they do not harm us, we will not harm them.'
He added: 'We only need a little amount of $7m.' He said the couple had been captured by 'our brothers who patrol the coast'.

Explaining the decision to set the ransom at $7m, the caller said: 'Nato operations had a lot of negative impact here...They have destroyed a lot of equipment belonging to the poor local fishermen...They arrest fishermen and destroy their equipment...In defiance to our local administrations, they illegally transfer the fishermen to their own prisons and prisons of other countries.

'So when you consider the damage and all the people affected we say the amount is not big.'

The BBC's East Africa Correspondent Will Ross said the pirates had held talks for several hours in Haredere on the Somali coast. He said they were trying to agree how much money they wanted for the release of the pair. He added that in previous cases pirates had begun negotiating with an extremely high figure, and then settled for far less.

Earlier, Somali premier Omar Sharmarke said government officials were trying to explain to the pirates the couple could offer no commercial reward and they only had their boat, the Lynn Rival.

He said the government was doing what it could for the hostages. The UK government's emergency committee Cobra has met in the Cabinet Office to discuss the kidnapping.

The BBC's security correspondent Frank Gardner has been told by Whitehall officials that the government has appointed a hostage negotiator who is on standby to deal with the case.

..........................................
Previous stories:
26th October, 2009: Pirate hostages Paul Chandler and his wife Rachel, now being held on a container ship while their yacht had been set adrift, called home yesterday to report their whereabouts and describe their ordeal at the hands of Somali pirates.

Paul, 59, told how he was off-watch and asleep when the pirates came aboard.
'It was on Friday last week at 0230' he was reported as saying. At gunpoint they were then forced to sail north towards the Somali coast. They were then transferred to a container ship, the Kota Wajah off the coast of pirate stronghold Harardheere.

Paul Chandler, of Kent, speaking by phone to his brother-in-law Stephen Collett said: 'I was asleep and men with guns came aboard....They kept asking for money and took everything of value on the boat.' However, when he asked how they were being treated, the mobile telephone call was ended suddenly. Searches for Mr Chandler and his wife, Rachel, had begun on Friday, after the pair sent a distress signal.

Their yacht was discovered during counter-piracy operations on Wednesday, but the couple were not on board, and the boat was adrift.

Last night Paul spoke by phone again, this time to the BBC, and said, 'We are being treated well.' However, the pirates have threatened violence to the couple if there is any attempt to free them by the Navies in the area.

The British Prime Minister yesterday appealed for their release - an appeal that the pirates, judging by previous hijackings, are unlikely to heed.

A spokeswoman for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office(FCO) said that FCO staff are in close contact with them and are offering support.

No ransom has as yet been demanded.

Background:

The British couple were travelling from the Seychelles towards East Africa in their 38ft yacht Lynn Rival when they went missing. Hailing from Tunbridge Wells in Kent, they had sailed down the Red Sea, crossed the Gulf of Aden very close to the coast of Yemen successfully, visited India and then the Seychelles. They then appeared to sail straight into the hands of pirates by sailing south east towards Tanzania in Africa. A British coastguard spokesman said that they had left the Seychelles on October 22 and were first headed for Amirante Islands, a 150 nautical mile passage.

First signal of the kidnapping came when an EPIRB was activated from their yacht Lynn Rival at 2300 on Friday and since then the Royal Navy have been scouring the sea in the area.

Leah Mickleborough, the couple's niece, told the Daily Mail that the couple were not naive. 'They are very experienced in these things. They are not the sort of people who would put themselves deliberately in danger.'

It is a mystery why the couple were headed into such waters. Two yachts from the Seychelles have been hijacked from those waters in the last year, which would have been well-known to the Chandlers, who had been cruising in Seychelles waters for seven months.

As the couple left the Seychelles they wrote on their blog: 'We'll be at sea for 8 to 12 days, maybe 14 as we are now getting into the period of transition between the south monsoon and north monsoon, so the trade winds will be less reliable and we may get more light winds. We probably won't have satellite phone coverage until we're fairly close to the African coast, so we may be out of touch for some time.'

Two days later, at 7.41am on 23rd October, the cryptic message 'PLEASE RING SARAH' was entered, and nothing has been heard since.

The Chandlers, married 25 years and with no children, took early retirement and three years ago boarded the Lynn Rival and embarked on the trip of a lifetime. They had already owned the boat for thirty years before embarking on the voyage.

The couple's niece Leah Mickleborough, who last saw them five weeks ago when they briefly returned to the UK for her wedding, said sailing was their passion. 'This is their life really. They do sailing, they live for this.'

Mr Chandler, a former civil engineer, and his wife, an economist, have a wealth of sailing experience and made their way from Turkey in January 2006 through the Suez Canal.

Light winds in the Seychelles region in recent weeks has given rise to a spate of hijack attempts as pirates make use of the fair conditions. An Indian cargo ship was hijacked off the coast of the Seychelles last Wednesday, and its more than two dozen crew members have not been heard from since. It was also reported that several Spanish trawlers working near the Seychelles are employing former British soldiers as armed guards.

The International Maritime Bureau's (IMB) Piracy Reporting Centre (PRC) reported eight pirate attacks in the last 10 days alone. In the latest attack, on Sunday, off the coast of Somalia, six pirates armed with machine guns opened fire on a container ship before it escaped.

The PRC reported 306 incidents in the first nine months of 2009, up from 293 in the same period the year before.