Wow, just wow.
Dutch commandos freed 20 Yemeni hostages on Saturday and briefly detained seven pirates who had forced the Yemenis to sail a “mother ship” attacking vessels in the Gulf of Aden, NATO officials said.
In a separate incident, gunmen from Somalia seized a Belgian-registered ship and its 10 crew, including seven Europeans, further south in the Indian Ocean.
“The Pompei is heading slowly toward the Somali coast,” Peter Mertens, a spokesman for a Belgian government crisis center, said. “We have had visual contact from a helicopter of a Spanish navy ship.”
Somali sea gangs have captured dozens of ships, taken hundreds of sailors prisoner and made off with tens of millions of dollars in ransoms despite an unprecedented deployment by foreign navies in waters off the Horn of Africa.
Sounds just dandy right? Now This:
He said the hostages had been held since last week. The commandos briefly detained and questioned the seven gunmen, he told Reuters, but had no legal power to arrest them.
NATO does not have a detainment policy.
Epic fail.