A US captain seized by Somali pirates and held hostage in the Indian Ocean for five days was freed on Sunday, the US state department said. "I can confirm that Captain (Richard) Phillips has been safely recovered," said spokeswoman Laura Tischler, without providing additional details on the operation. CNN television, citing a senior US official, reported that three of the four pirates holding Mr Phillips had been killed, and the fourth pirate was in custody. Mr Phillips, who was unharmed, had been taken aboard the USS Bainbridge, one of the two US naval warships involved in the tense stand-off near the Somali coast, according to the network. The breakthrough came shortly after four freed hostages, including the widow and three-year-old son of a French sailor killed in a special forces shootout with Somali pirates, landed back in Paris. Mr Phillips had been held aboard a lifeboat since Wednesday when his ship's unarmed crew managed to regain control of their Danish-operated container ship from the Somali pirates, the Maersk Alabama. The fleeing pirates bundled him into the lifeboat as they escaped. They had demanded a ransom and said today they planned to move Mr Phillips to another ship held by their "friends." US navy forces had been steadily pouring into the region over the past few days. Negotiations to free Mr Phillips had broken down yesterday after US authorities insisted the pirates be arrested after handing him over, a Somali elder Mohamoud Jama told AFP. However, after talks resumed, a top senator warned that the US approach to the problem was "going to have to be much more aggressive." "We're not going to give in to blackmail, and we're not going to allow them to continue to do what they're doing," Republican senator Tom Coburn told the Fox News today. The New York Times had reported that the pirates had fired on a small US navy vessel that tried to approach the lifeboat yesterday. Mr Phillips' former command, the Maersk Alabama, arrived in Mombasa, Kenya yesterday. Its crew were kept on board while FBI agents debriefed them, but one of them described their captain as a hero, in comments to reporters on the dockside. Meanwhile in France toda, Chloé Lemacon, her three-year-old son Colin and two friends, touched down at a military airport near Paris after they were freed by French commandos on Friday. The yacht's owner and father of the child, Florent Lemacon, was killed in the raid along with two pirates. Three others were taken prisoner. French defence minister Herve Morin has said he could not out that Mr Lemacon was killed by French fire. And today he appealed to French citizens to say away from the trouble waters off Somalia. Francis Lemacon, the skipper's father, issued a statement paying tribute to his son and thanking the French state and the soldiers "who risked their lives" to rescue the hostages. "We have lost more than a son. We are crushed by grief," he wrote in a statement to AFP. As the US hostage drama drew to a close however, another group of pirates was manoeuvring an Italian vessel and its 16-strong crew toward the Somali coastline after having hijacked it yesterday, pirate sources said today. The Buccaneer's crew comprises 10 Italians, five Romanians and a Croat, spokesman Claudio Bartolotti told AFP from the headquarters of the boat's owners Micoperi Marine Contractors, in Ravenna, northern Italy. A pirate told AFP that the Italian boat was being directed toward Las Qorey on the Somali coast of the Gulf of Aden. "There are more than 10 pirates onboard the tugboat," he said from the pirate lair of Eyl. "There are also three speedboats accompanying it to the area." The seizure yesterday of the Italian ship and its crew was the latest in an sudden flurry of pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. * AFP
