A rescue gone wrong

In the introduction to The Authenticity Hoax, I set thet able for the argument by telling the story of Florent and Chloe Lemacon, the French couple who, along with their son Colin, were kidnapped by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden. In the subsequent standoff, Francois was accidentally shot and killed by a French commando.

The Irish Times has a very good followup to the story, setting the record straight on a few points. The most important is Chloe's claim that, media reports to the contrary, they hadn't sailed recklessly into the Gulf of Aden, they were in fact 900 km from the coast:

Each day they had telephoned their co-ordinates to their parents, who passed them on to the French navy’s command centre in the region. They were probably just unlucky. The pirates who came across the Tanit had unsuccessfully chased a cargo ship far out to sea earlier that day and now found themselves in the middle of the Indian Ocean with no food or water. The Tanit would be their lifeline. Within 24 hours, news of the yacht’s capture had spread across the world. The French naval command centre in Djibouti immediately dispatched three warships and a team of special forces commandos to the scene.