Somalis to face kidnapping charges in the Netherlands

by Sail-World Cruising roundup on 7 Dec 2010 There's no word of the South African cruising sailors kidnapped over a month ago while sailing off Tanzania, but some of their alleged abductors have been flown to the Netherlands to face charges of kidnapping.

Five Somalis of the twenty arrested last week are now in the Netherlands. They are the ones suspected of having abducted two South Africans from their yacht off the Seychelles. They were transferred to the Netherlands Sunday for trial, the Dutch defence ministry announced.

'The Somalis are suspected of having hijacked the South Africa yacht Choizil and abducted two South African citizens November 7,' said a ministry statement.

Late last month, the Dutch navy arrested the Somalis off the coast of Somalia who were suspected of the abductions in two separate operations. However, fifteen of them had to be released due to lack of evidence.

Defence ministry spokesman Marloes Visser told AFP the suspects were being flown into the country on a military airplane and were due in at Eindhoven, in the south of the country.

Court spokesman Wim de Bruin told AFP the suspects would be tried for piracy in the western city of Rotterdam. They faced up to 12 years in prison if convicted of having led the pirates, nine if they were among the pirate crew.

Pirates attacked the South African yacht off the Seychelles on October 26, taking three hostages. The skipper, Peter Eldridge, escaped earlier this month, but two South African nationals, Bruno Pelizzari and Deborah Calitz, remain in the hands of pirates. The families of the two abducted sailors are now not giving out information about possible contact with the pirates. The three cruising sailors had thought that they were safer from piracy than others because of their South African citizenship

A court in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam jailed five Somali pirates in June over an attack on a cargo ship in the Gulf of Aden, the first conviction of its kind in Europe.