By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Ishaq Dar, the deputy prime minister and foreign minister, will travel to the United Kingdom this week for a five-day diplomatic mission that will put him face to face with the officials he hopes can help free ten Pakistani sailors still held captive by Somali pirates more than four months after their ship was seized.
The Foreign Office announced the trip, scheduled for Aug. 24 through 28, in a social media post on Sunday, laying out a itinerary heavy with meetings that reflect the breadth of the relationship Islamabad is trying to manage with London — trade, security, and now, increasingly, the fate of a single hijacked oil tanker.
Dar’s agenda includes sit-downs with UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband and Stephen Doughty, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s minister of state for Pakistan, along with other senior figures in the British government, according to the Foreign Office statement. He is also expected to meet Commonwealth Secretary-General Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey, and to hold talks with British parliamentarians and members of the Pakistani diaspora community.
But it is a meeting with the secretary-general of the International Maritime Organization that may carry the most weight for ten families back home who have spent months waiting for word on their loved ones.
Those ten Pakistani nationals were among 17 crew members aboard the MT Honour 25, a Palau-flagged oil tanker, when pirates seized the vessel off the coast of Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland region on April 21. In the months since, relatives of the captive sailors have grown increasingly vocal, describing worsening conditions aboard the ship and pressing Islamabad to do more.
Dar himself weighed in earlier this month, pushing Pakistani authorities to step up diplomatic outreach — not just with Somali officials, but with international partners more broadly — in hopes of securing the crew’s release. A Foreign Office spokesperson has said Pakistan has separately pressed the Somali government and the tanker’s owner to make sure the hostages continue receiving food, water, and other basic necessities while negotiations continue. The government has also said, more broadly, that it remains committed to bringing the detained Pakistanis home.
The London trip comes on the heels of a series of diplomatic exchanges between Islamabad and London this summer aimed at deepening cooperation across several fronts. In July, the two countries agreed to intensify their bilateral trade relationship and strengthen business-to-business ties, with officials discussing whether to formalize their existing Trade Dialogue into a more structured economic and trade framework.
A month earlier, in June, Pakistan and the UK reached an understanding to broaden cooperation on counterterrorism, illegal migration, and human smuggling, along with institutional collaboration and police training. That agreement grew out of a meeting between Pakistan’s interior minister, Mohsin Naqvi, and Hamish Falconer, the UK’s minister of state for the Middle East, South Asia and the United Nations.
During a visit to the Pakistani capital, Falconer announced that Britain would commit an additional £8 million to joint efforts between the two countries to combat crime and illegal migration — a pledge the British High Commission confirmed in a statement issued June 16. According to that statement, the funding is intended to strengthen border and visa systems and bolster law enforcement capabilities against smuggling and trafficking networks. It will also help fund the return of individuals with no legal right to remain in the UK, the commission said, as well as community-based programs in high-risk areas meant to address the underlying causes of illegal migration.
Taken together, officials say, the relationship between Pakistan and the UK now spans trade, security, counterterrorism, climate policy, and migration — a portfolio broad enough that Dar’s visit this week is unlikely to be the last high-level exchange between the two governments this year. But for the families of the ten sailors still aboard the MT Honour 25, the outcome of Dar’s meeting with the International Maritime Organization may matter more than anything else on his itinerary.
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