The crew of a Royal Navy vessel watched helplessly as a British yachting
By John Bingham The Telegraph
The 100-strong crew of the RFA Wave Knight were under orders not to open fire as Paul and Rachel Chandler, of Tunbridge Wells, Kent, were taken from their yacht for fear that the couple could be executed by the pirates.
With the nearest warship, HMS Cumberland, two hours away, the lightly armed Royal Fleet Auxiliary ship, which was carrying a helicopter crew and 75 merchant seamen, was forced to play a high stakes waiting game, the Royal Navy said.
But there are fears that the presence of the British ship may even have rushed the pirates into taking the couple off their 38ft yacht, the Lynn Rival, more quickly.
As the naval vessel approached, they were taken onto a a launch which then sped them to the hostage takers' mother ship, a hijacked merchant vessel, nearby.
Details of the operation were kept secret by the Ministry of Defence until they were disclosed by an anonymous member of the crew who said that they had come within just 50ft of the couple at one point.
A carefully worded official account of the kidnap released last month said only that a Royal Navy vessel had found the couple's yacht empty, without disclosing that the couple were within sight at the time.
There was also no mention of the RFA vessel's involvement leading to reports that HMS Cumberland had found the yacht drifting and abandoned off the coast of Somalia.
A Royal Navy spokesman said that the details had been withheld for reasons of "operational security".
But defending the decision not to open fire, he said: "What you have got is a hostile situation with a bunch of chimps who are clearly unhappy, you have really got to be absolutely sure of what you are doing before you start trying to release hostages because you could end up with the hostages getting killed.
He went on: "What you have got is a small open boat which is crammed full of pirates armed with AK47s and Rocked Propelled Grenades and two middle-aged yachties, all loaded into this small boat which is full of fuel.
"The ship that escorted it was the Wave Knight, that's a Royal Fleet Auxiliary, she has a helicopter and a helicopter crew and some self defence weapons but she doesn't have a crew of snipers.
"There was a very fine line of what they could do to prevent the Chandlers being taken from the yacht to the merchant vessel. "You don't have someone who is competent with a weapon -and this is a very high level of competence – to start slotting pirates."
With HMS Cumberland on its way, he said that the RFA crew continued "playing for time" as long as they could but the pirates were able to escape.
He also suggested that the presence crew may have sped up the kidnap.
"By the time we found the yacht the Chandlers were not actually on board it, they were in the act of being transferred to another pirates vessel," he said.
"When they realised they were about to be bounced they took the Chandlers off the yacht onto a skiff which they had been towing."
The couple, who were sailing from the Seychelles to Tanzania, are now thought to be being held on land in Somalia following a $7 million (£4.2 million) ransom deman
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