Pirates have stormed a French luxury yacht off the coast of Somalia and taken its 30 crew hostage, the boat's owners said on Friday.

Luxury sailboat the Ponant was heading from the Seychelles to the Mediterranean Sea when pirates stormed it in the Gulf of Aden, which lies between Somalia and Yemen, said a spokesman for the boat's owner, the Compagnie des Iles du Ponant. There were no customers on board, a spokesman for the tour company said, adding that most of the crew are French.

"We have been informed that pirates are on board. We are in close contact with the Foreign Ministry," said the spokesman for the Compagnie des Iles du Ponant, which is part of the CMA-CGM shipping group.

Pirate attacks regularly disrupt shipping off the Somali coast, according to the International Maritime Bureau, which reported some 31 cases of piracy in the area in 2007. The yacht, shown on the tour company's Web site, is an 88-metre (289 ft), three-mast ship capable of housing 64 passengers in its 32 cabins, all of which are equipped with a flat-screen television and a minibar. The parent company said its crew had been "taken hostage" but it did not wish to elaborate on the situation.

The French Foreign Ministry said in a statement an "interministerial crisis cell" had been set up and it was in close contact with the yacht's owners.

"The Ministry for Foreign and European Affairs has received information which suggests that a cruise ship and its crew, some of whom are French citizens, were victims of a piracy operation in the Gulf of Aden," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. France Info radio said surveillance aircraft had been diverted to the area and a ship from the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom was heading towards the site of the attack.

French Defence Ministry spokesman Christophe Prazuck declined to say whether French Navy ships would head to the site, but added that ships in anti-terrorist unit Task Force 150, part of Operation Enduring Freedom, were in the area.