Indian police said Wednesday they would charge 14 suspected Somali pirates and their three hostages who drifted to within kilometres (miles) of the country's west coast in a fishing boat. A senior police official said that investigators believed three Yemeni men found on the trawler were hostages of the alleged pirates, who are believed to have hijacked the vessel two weeks ago off the coast of Somalia.
The Yemenis told police the boat had been adrift in the Indian Ocean after running out of fuel and had been carried to the Indian coast by the tide. All 17 men were detained in the coastal district of Junagarh in Gujarat state, some 300 kilometres (186 miles) south-west from the main regional city of Ahmedabad.
"After interrogation we have ascertained that the Somali nationals are pirates who had kidnapped the three Yemenis," Junagarh police chief Depankar Trivedi told AFP by telephone. He said police would press charges against the Somalis and their captives for entering India without valid travel documents. The official said the Somalis were only charged with trespassing because the hijacking occurred beyond India's jurisdiction in international waters.
"We are charging them only for the violation of Indian laws," he said, adding the three Yemenis did not possess travel documents and so were also in breach of India's Passport Act. Trivedi said a marine police team detained the men on Sunday after local fishermen reported the presence of the Yemen-flagged vessel only a couple of kilometres (miles) off the coast of Gujarat.
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