THE Royal Navy's frigate, HMS Cornwall, intercepted a Yemini dhow commandeered as a pirate mothership, liberated its hostage crew, held the Somalis pirates who had seized the vessel, but let them go, reports London's International Freighting Weekly.
"Unless navies capture pirates undertaking an act of piracy, there is a very limited legal basis on which they can be prosecuted," said the Ministry of Defence spokesman.
"Frequently, pirates are detained and returned to shore, while the paraphernalia for conducting pirate attacks - grappling hooks, weapons, ropes, ladders, rocket-propelled grenades, as was the case in this incident - are destroyed," said the MOD spokesman.
"Often, we destroy the skiffs. They often carry lots of fuel, because they will be at sea much longer than you would expect a fishing vessel to be, and we remove this," he said.
The 4,800-ton warship, with a complement of 250, operates with vessels from other navies as part of the Combined Maritime Force to deter piracy in and around the Gulf of Aden.