– ‘War, hunger’ –
The Colombos had sold everything before embarking on a dream round-the-world trip.
They left the Yemen port of Aden in early September 2011 and were heading for Oman — a journey that took them through notoriously pirate-infested waters — when naval authorities received a distress signal from their “Tribal Kat” catamaran.
A German frigate found the boat several hours later. There were bullet holes in the deck and a pair of glasses lying in a pool of blood. No one was onboard.
Two days later, a Spanish warship located the skiff believed to belong to the pirates. They tried to approach but turned away when the attackers dragged Evelyne Colombo into view, a gun to her head.
The Spanish military prepared a raid and attacked a few hours later, leaving two pirates dead and the remaining seven under arrest.
Evelyne Colombo told her rescuers that her husband’s body had been dumped into the sea. It was never found.
She had spent a nightmarish 48 hours with the pirates, kept under a tarpaulin, drenched by waves and in constant fear of death.
The defence team sought to present the seven Somalis as unwilling criminals forced into piracy by the hardships of life in Somalia.
“War… hunger… for these men to be properly judged, the court must understand the hell from which they have come,” one of their lawyers, Martin Reynaud, previously told AFP, saying this could only explain rather than excuse their actions.
The dramatic decline in piracy off the Somali coast means the trial could be the last in Europe for some time.
The European Union’s military counter-piracy mission “Atalante” saw zero vessels pirated over the past three years, compared with a peak of 47 in 2010.
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