The crew of the Sirius Star should avoid confronting the gunmen holding their supertanker and engage them in conversation while waiting for outside help, a man who was held hostage by Somali pirates said yesterday.

“You are powerless when faced with their firearms,” said Jean-Yves Delanne, 60, who was released on September 15 by French special forces after he and his wife, Bernadette, had been held on their yacht for two weeks. “It is best to stay calm. They should play for time and not give in to the temptation to rush things while the experts analyse the situation,” he told The Times.

The French couple were fortunate: their captors never took them ashore. The Carré d’As, their 53ft yacht, was taken to an anchorage just off the village of Abot. After a dispute between the pirates, it was moved along the Puntland coast to Bargal.

“When we were freed, I found out they were going to take us to Eyl, which is frightening because they would have put us on land. This would have been hard to escape from,” Mr Delanne said. “We would still be there if the commandos had not intervened at sea.”

The yachtsman docked at Hyères, on the French Mediterranean, last weekend after flying to Djibouti and sailing the Carré d’As back to France.

President Sarkozy had ordered the navy commandos’ assault when it became clear that the yacht was heading to Eyl, lair of the Puntland pirates. One pirate was killed in the attack and six others are to stand trial in France.

The vessel, which the Delannes were delivering for its owner from Australia to France, had been boarded by a dozen gunmen on two fast boats 90 miles offshore. They fired a burst with their Kalashnikov assault rifles, Mr Delanne said. “They were quite threatening. One of them took command and became more reassuring, and told us they were not going to hurt us.

“The next day they demanded $4 million, then $2 million the following day. I tried to talk to them a lot, saying it was impossible to find such a sum and that it wasn’t our boat and that I was a workman like they were.

“They stayed firm. They had no political demands. They just wanted money, but it was possible to talk with them. They were afraid that we would communicate by internet. After a while, they let us wander about on the boat.”

The pirates let the couple communicate with the French authorities by text message on a satellite telephone. Mr Delanne would not go into detail.

The Navy kept the yacht under observation and reported to the Élysée.

“We were not really frightened,” Mr Delanne said. Some of the gunmen seemed unfamiliar with using their weapons.

Times Recommends

• 'I was amazed by the fact I had been wounded'
• The great pilgrimage to Inauguration Day
• Robot fails to survive the credit crunch