Eight suspected pirates arrived in a Kenyan court Thursday to face trial on charges stemming from their attempted hijacking of a Danish freighter in November.

The eight Somalis were led off a prison bus in a double line, handcuffed to each other in pairs. They were dressed in blue coveralls and red sandals to distinguish them from the other suspects being brought to court.

One sarcastically raised a salute to his guards as he was led into the courthouse basement.

The eight were delivered to Kenya after their capture by the British frigate HMS Cumberland in the Gulf of Aden.

They were caught during a November 11 attempt to hijack the Danish cargo ship MV Powerful, an effort thwarted by helicopters from the Cumberland and the Russian frigate Neustrashimy.

But defense lawyer Jared Magolo told CNN that his clients are fishermen. Since they were caught off the coast of Yemen, he said they would challenge the jurisdiction of Kenyan courts.

"They are fishermen who were fishing in Yemeni waters," Magolo said. "The British vessel attacked them and they lost their fish."

International law gives maritime powers wide latitude as to where pirates should be tried. But Andrew Mwangura, the head of the Kenya Seafarers Association, said the men should have been handed over to Yemeni authorities

"You apply the laws of the nationality of that ship and the area that the ship was when the incident happens," he said.

An international fleet has been patrolling the waters off the Horn of Africa for months in an effort to clamp down on the spread of hijackings from largely lawless Somalia.

More than 40 vessels have been taken and held for ransom in 2008, according to the Malaysia-based International Maritime Bureau.

But Mwangura said the clampdown is unlikely to work until the "root cause" of the problem -- the poverty of Somalia, which has had no effective government since 1991 -- is addressed.

"The young men are poor," he said. "The real pirates are the sharks outside of Somalia, and these are the ones that take big money." While naval efforts to contain the problem are useful, more should be done on land to ease the problems, he said.

"The presence is good, but we should do something diplomatically, politically," Mwangura said. "Talk to the people, the common people."