Somali pirates
Oct 9, 2011 16:38:28 GMT
Post by bixaorellana on Oct 9, 2011 16:38:28 GMT
On October 23, 2009, British couple Paul and Rachel Chandler were kidnapped from their sailing boat off the archipelago of the Seychelles. Naval forces and search rescue centres did not swing into full action until the story broke on October 27 when Somalis informed the media that the couple were in their hands. The yacht, S/Y Lynn Rival, was found the next day by naval forces, abandoned off the Central Somali Coast.*
The boat was slowly edging away from Mahé, the main island in the Seychelles archipelago, for Tanga, Tanzania, the beginning of a two-week passage across the Indian Ocean. The wind was pushing them farther north than they’d planned to be. With no ships or land in sight, the Chandlers’ 38-foot sailboat, the Lynn Rival, bobbed along all alone.
Rachel, who is 57, was on watch ... and her husband, Paul, was asleep below deck. It was about 2:30 a.m. ... Because the wind was so faint, Rachel turned on the sailboat’s small engine, which chugged along at five knots, just loud enough to drown out other noise.
By the time she heard the high-pitched whine of outboard motors at full throttle, she had only seconds to react. Two skiffs suddenly materialized out of the murk, and when she swung the flashlight’s beam onto the water, two gunshots rang out.
Paragraphs above are from the compelling NYTimes magazine article about the incident. Click text for full article.
*Text taken from Amazon.com's page on the Chandler's book Hostage: A Year at Gunpoint with Somali Gangsters. Here
