Warders swap Isle of Wight for royal honeymoon isle (From Daily Echo)
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Prison warders from the Isle of Wight head to Seychelles to guard a gang of pirates
3:00pm Monday 13th February 2012 in News
A TEAM of prison warders has swapped the Isle of Wight for the Seychelles after landing the job of guarding a gang of notorious pirates.
While their colleagues freeze at home in the coldest temperatures of the year, the six officers from the Island’s prisons are spending two months in the Indian Ocean paradise where Prince William and Kate Middleton spent their honeymoon.
They have been recruited to keep watch over a band of Somali pirates led by a man dubbed the “modern-day Long John Silver”.
The outlaws were captured by the Royal Navy and handed to the authorities in the Seychelles, but the country says it does not have the resources to cope with the captives.
The pirates were wielding guns and rocket-propelled grenades when they were seized from a hijacked Yemeni fishing boat by the Navy’s Fort Victoria, which is on a four-month mission in the region as part of Nato’s counter-piracy task force.
The Seychelles only has one prison, which holds just 400 inmates, and the islands’ government sent out an international appeal for help.
The Foreign Office will now pick up the tab for the six Isle of Wight officers, who are normally based at Parkhurst, Camp Hill and Albany prisons in Newport, to work alongside and train the country’s handful of warders.
It is expected the bill for the operation, including flights, accommodation, wages and expenses, will run into tens of thousands of pounds.
The 18-strong pirate gang is led by a notorious man nicknamed “Six-Toe Joe”, who has a rare condition called polydactyly, which means he has an extra digit on each hand and foot.
He was wanted after being blamed for a string of piracy offences in the Indian Ocean.
