By Staff Reporter
KARACHI: Four injured Pakistani seamen and the remains of three of their shipmates arrived in Karachi on Sunday, more than five months after Somali pirates seized their oil tanker and days after a bloody operation to retake it.
The survivors, Usman Ghani, Aqeel Khan, Ameen bin Shams and Yasir Khan, flew from Addis Ababa on Ethiopian Airlines flight ET 694 with the coffins of Rafiullah Khan, Syed Kashif Umer and Mahmood Ahmad Ansari. All the Pakistanis killed or injured came from different parts of Karachi.
Sindh Governor Nihal Hashmi and the provincial ministers Saeed Ghani and Syed Nasir Hussain Shah were among the officials who met the aircraft at Jinnah International Airport and oversaw the arrangements. The injured men left the terminal later and were welcomed by officials.
“I feel very good to be back in my homeland,” bin Shams told reporters. Khan said: “I am happy to be back in Pakistan.” Pakistan’s ambassadors to Djibouti and Ethiopia saw the group off in Addis Ababa.
The Palau-flagged MT Honour 25 was taken about 30 nautical miles off the coast of Puntland, in north-eastern Somalia. It was carrying 18,500 barrels of oil and 17 crew when six armed gunmen boarded it. Ten of the crew were Pakistani.
For around five months there was no progress in negotiations or in payment of a ransom said to be about $3m, even as fears grew for the hostages’ health. The crew made several emotional video and audio appeals, saying they had run out of clean water, food and medicine. Families of the Pakistani sailors held a protest in Karachi in May, urging the government to act. The Foreign Office maintained throughout that it was “actively engaged” in securing their release.
The pirates are reported to have cut their demand from $3m to $1.9m and then to $1m. Advocate Quratulain of the Ansar Burney Trust said it had fallen to $1m by the time Puntland forces closed in.
The ship was retaken on 29 September by Puntland’s Maritime Police Force. Puntland authorities said their forces captured 16 pirates, while Somali maritime police said 21 suspects had been detained, with operations continuing to find others. Five crew members died: three Pakistanis, one Myanmar national and one Indian. Puntland’s account is that the pirates killed them before the vessel was secured.
Quratulain said the pirates brought the hostages onto the deck when they saw Puntland forces approaching. “They tied their hands and warned to kill them if the police force came anywhere near them without paying them the ransom,” she said. She said the pirates opened fire as security forces advanced, killing the five.
Two surviving Pakistani crew members later called the Ansar Burney Welfare Trust in Karachi on the captain’s mobile phone and described what had happened.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced Rs12.5m for each family of the three dead sailors, free education and healthcare for their children and a house for each family.
The release comes as Somali piracy, which flared in 2008-2014 at a cost of billions to world trade, is again a worry for shipping in the Gulf of Aden and western Indian Ocean. Puntland forces freed another tanker, the Sibu 1, a week before Honour 25. With Honour 25 recovered, the product tanker Asana, hijacked on 17 July, is the only vessel reported still held by pirates in Somalia.
