St. Lucia arrests five suspected in British man's yacht murder

A British man was murdered in the Caribbean island of St. Lucia on Friday night during a robbery aboard his yacht, the Magnetic Attraction. His wife was badly beaten in the attack.

Roger Pratt, 62, and his wife Jenny, 60, had been in St. Lucia for nearly three weeks on a stop during their voyage from England to the Caribbean. The Pratts left England in June on a planned post-retirement voyage.

The Pratts were docked in Vieux Fort on the southern coast of St. Lucia Friday when three armed men attacked them Friday evening.

St. Lucia police arrested five men in connection with the death; they will soon be formally charged. The postmortem revealed that Roger, whose body was recovered from the water, died of "asphyxia secondary to blunt force trauma."

Neighbors of the Pratts described Roger as safety-conscious. Aware of the possibility of piracy, he had taken a course on piracy avoidance.

Vicar John Parker, from the Pratts' hometown of Moreton Paddox, said of the couple "They set off on the experience of a lifetime only for them to have been set upon, it seems, by robbers in a crime that appears to have gone horribly wrong."

[The Guardian] [The Telegraph] [BBC]