Couple taken by pirates beg government to act

The Somali pirates holding the British couple Paul and Rachel Chandler to ransom have tried to put the squeeze on the British government by allowing Paul Chandler to give a desperate phone interview, in which he told how he and his wife had been beaten and whipped by their captors and feared they were about to be killed.

"They have lost patience," Chandler told ITV News. "They have set a deadline of three or four days. If they don't hear then [from the British government], they say they will let us die. I'm just existing in hope. I'm afraid that they will just kill us and abandon us in the desert here."

Although the Foreign Office continues to say it is doing everything it can to secure their release, friends of the couple are wondering exactly what that might be. The government has made it absolutely clear that it will not pay ransom money to terrorists under any circumstances. So the fact that the pirates dropped their demand from £4m-plus to £1.9m earlier this month is of no consequence.

The Chandlers (pictured above on TV in November) don't have that sort of wealth themselves, and even if a rich benefactor was to step in, the government would be bound to try to stop it. There have been reports that the Chandlers' freedom was nearly bought for as little as £60,000 around Christmas before the government allegedly put a block on the deal.

There were hopes in the early days after their kidnapping on October 23 that a prisoner swap arrangement might be the way round the impasse. But the captured pirates had been taken by the German navy, not the British, and nothing seems to have come of it.

Paul Chandler's phone call to ITV News came 90 days after the couple were grabbed by the pirates from their yacht Lynn Rival, which the retired couple from Tunbridge Wells were sailing from the Seychelles towards Tanzania.

Chandler, 59, told ITV that he feared his 55-year-old wife Rachel Chandler, from whom he had been separated by his kidnappers, was on the point of "giving up".

"We tried to stay together and they threw us to the ground and whipped us, and beat Rachel with the rifle butts and I was dragged off and taken to a different location," he said.

"I was allowed to telephone her about 12 days ago. She said she was being tormented all the time and she said she was giving up. We're held in solitary confinement effectively, just treated as a captive animal."

In a separate interview, Mrs Chandler, begged the government to meet the pirates' demands. "They've just told me that if they don't get the money within four or five days they'll kill one of us," she said.

Asked if she had a message for her husband, she responded: "The message to him is hang on for me because I hope, my biggest hope is that I shall see him at least once more before we die." ·