A disabled Frenchwoman in her sixties was last night a prisoner in Somalia after a shootout at sea failed to stop the pirates who seized her from her Kenyan holiday home.
6:33PM BST 01 Oct 2011
Kenya's Coast Guard and its army had earlier discovered Marie Dedieu and her attackers in an open boat speeding towards the Somali border, not far from the spot where pirates seized British tourist Judith Tebbutt last month.
Despite repeated attempts to force the vessel to stop, and amid sustained gunfire which injured several of the gang, Kenya's government last night admitted that it had been unable to rescue the woman before her kidnappers crossed into Somalian waters.
A source at France's defence ministry said that its forces based in Djibouti further up the coast, and its troops with the international anti-piracy force, were "involved" in the search for Ms Dedieu, 66.
France has in the past mounted special forces operations to free its nationals take hostage by Somali pirates. At least one hostage died during the last such mission, in 2009.
Ms Dedieu, who uses a wheelchair, was a retired French journalist who spends more than half of the year at a house she had bought on Manda, one of a string of islands of the Lamu archipelago off Kenya's northern Indian Ocean coast. She had returned from a summer trip to France only on Friday, sources said.
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