Pirates hijack three children, their parents and two crewmembers in Indian Ocean

A Danish family including three children have been kidnapped by pirates who hijacked their sailing boat in the Indian Ocean. According to Danish authorities, three children aged between 12 and 16, their parents and two crew members were taken captive by Somalian pirates on 24th February.

Lene Espersen, Denmark's foreign minister, said that after receiving a distress signal from the boat on Thursday, she could now confirm that the family had been taken hostage. "It's almost unbearable to think that there are children involved and I can only sharply denounce the pirates' actions," Espersen said, adding that the government would do everything in its power to help resolve the situation, according to IceNews.

A spokesman for the European Union's anti-piracy force highlighted the difficulty of playing defense against swarms of pirates in small boats: "Even traveling in groups is not a protection for yachts. It's just a bigger target for the pirates. When you're on a yacht, it can take seconds from when pirates are seen to when they're on board."

Policing the coast of Somalia is far more difficult than sanitizing it would be. If the open sea now belongs to any brigand who wants to claim it, a new age of barbarism has descended upon us. Hopefully the captive Danes and their children will not become its latest victims, Human Events reports.