The UN Security Council has announced a major tactical shift in the war against Somali pirates today. Highly-trained special ops teams will be deployed deep into the war-torn territory, where armed with projectors and pull-down movie screens they will show a new version of the classic anti-piracy film that British movie fans have sat through at the beginning of every commercially produced DVD for years.

The UN believes that the film’s hard-hitting message will resonate with the pirates, causing them to hang up their weapons and scupper their boats. ‘Villagers from Mogadishu to Puntland will be confronted with the stark question posed by this film’ asserts US Rear Admiral Terry McKnight, head of the anti-piracy task force.

‘You wouldn’t steal a car,’ says the sombre voice-over on the hard-hitting information film. ‘You wouldn’t steal a handbag. You wouldn’t steal a mobile phone. You wouldn’t hijack a massive container ship and hold it to ransom for millions of dollars’ it concludes. ‘Piracy is stealing’.

One Somali warlord admitted to being completely swayed by the no-nonsense message of the film. ‘I’d always just thought that boarding oil tankers with machine guns and machetes was one of those legal grey areas, like home-taping or not wearing your seat belt in the back of the car. But now I’ve seen this video I’ll definitely think again.’ Another was equally distraught to be told that once on board an illegally seized supertanker, it was also wrong to use the ship’s computer and satellite equipment to download their favourite Amy Winehouse tracks from Limewire.

Now that the message is finally getting across, the UN are confident that the piracy problem will soon be a thing of the past. ‘Just look at the effect the film had on the illegal DVD market in the UK – you can imagine how the hardliners in Somalia will react!’