Pirates try to sell hostage's body to family

Somali pirates who let a disabled French woman hostage die in captivity now want to sell her body back to her family.

Wheelchair-bound Marie Dedieu, 66, was dragged from her beachfront home in Kenya and abducted on a speedboat by an armed gang on October 1.

But her captors denied her the medicine she needed to take every four hours to stave off infections, and she died this week, officials in Paris announced. French defence minister Gerard Longuet said: "And now to add the worst kind of insult to their abominable act, they are trying to sell her body back to her loved ones.

"To abduct a woman of this age, who was disabled, then deny her her medicine, let her die and then make this demand is utterly abject, and they are to be despised for this." The amount being demanded was not revealed.

Ms Dedieu, one of the founders of France's Women's Liberation Movement in the Sixties, used a wheelchair after being hit by a car in the late Seventies and suffered from cancer. She moved to Kenya's Lamu archipelago 15 years ago where she lived with 39-year-old boyfriend John Lepapa.