By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is working to bring home four seafarers freed from a hijacked oil tanker off Somalia, along with the bodies of three colleagues killed by their captors, as families in Karachi brace for a homecoming that will bring relief to some and a funeral to others.
The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) said on Saturday that arrangements to repatriate the remains were under way on the instructions of Shehbaz Sharif. The bodies have been taken to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, where Ethiopian Airlines is reviewing how to carry them onward.
“Following this, final approval will be granted for their departure on a flight bound for Karachi,” the PMO said. “In accordance with the prime minister’s instructions, the relevant authorities are in continuous contact to expedite the repatriation process.”
The statement said the prime minister had promised “all possible assistance” in returning the dead.
The three men were among 10 Pakistanis aboard the MT Honour 25, a Palau-flagged tanker seized by Somali pirates on 21 April about 30 nautical miles off the coast of Puntland, the semi-autonomous region in the north-east of the country. They were killed shortly before Puntland’s maritime police stormed the vessel on Tuesday.
Survivors expected in Karachi
Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said on Friday that four of the 10 Pakistani crew had been safely retrieved after sustained efforts by the Foreign Office and Pakistan’s embassy in Djibouti. They are Yasir Khan, Aqeel Khan, Amin bin Shams and Usman Ghani, and Dar said they were due in Karachi on Saturday.
The date may slip. The Express Tribune reported that a relative of one of the men expected them to land on Sunday, travelling from Addis Ababa on an Ethiopian Airlines flight, ET694. The newspaper also reported that the bodies of the three dead sailors remain in Addis Ababa amid documentation problems, and that officials hope to fly them home alongside the survivors. The Independent has not been able to confirm either flight arrangement independently.
Dar said three other Pakistani crew members, Imran Ali, Yasin Muhammad and Syed Yousuf Hussain, remain aboard the vessel with its captain. It was not immediately clear why they are still on the ship.
The dead
The Foreign Office identified the dead on Wednesday as Rafiullah Khan, Syed Kashif Umer and Mahmood Ahmed Ansari. Umer, a second officer from Karachi’s Buffer Zone area, had spent 25 years in the merchant navy. The Ansar Burney Trust, a Pakistani human rights charity, said he had told others in his last conversation that food, drinking water and other essential supplies aboard were running out.
The Foreign Office said three other Pakistanis were injured in the operation. Local media reported that Khan suffered a bullet wound to the leg, and that the survivors received initial treatment in Addis Ababa.
Ansari’s son, Izhar, was preparing a grave for his father when reporters reached him. The family had not been told when the body would arrive.
The PMO said Sharif had announced a relief package of Rs12.5 million for the bereaved families, along with free housing and free education for the children of the dead. The prime minister also telephoned Umer’s son, Azhan Kashif, to offer his condolences.
A long wait for families
For about five months, negotiations to free the crew made no progress. No ransom, reported to be around $3 million, was paid despite growing concern about the men’s health. The crew released several emotional video and audio appeals, saying they had run out of clean water, food and medicine. The Foreign Office maintained throughout that it was “actively engaged” in securing their release. Last month, Pakistan asked the International Maritime Organisation to intervene.
Relatives of the hostages held a protest in Karachi in May, calling on the government to act.
Local media described families who spent months dreading every phone call. One wife, Ayesha, said her baby son was two weeks old when her husband sailed. “Every time the phone rang, we feared it would bring bad news,” she said. Another, Mahwish, whose husband was the one shot in the leg, said that the families had never imagined seven of them would be reunited with loved ones while three received bodies.
The operation
In its first statement, the Puntland Maritime Police Force said naval and ground units carried out “a planned operation” in the Dharin-Bar area of Bandar Beyla district. It later said the tanker was “now safe and under the Puntland government’s control”.
The force said pirates killed five crew members before the raid began: three Pakistanis, one Myanmar national and one Indian. The vessel’s crew also included seven Indonesians, an Indian and a Sri Lankan alongside the Pakistanis, making 19 in all. Puntland said 21 suspected pirates were detained and that operations to find the others were continuing. Other accounts have put the number of arrests at between 15 and 16, and the discrepancy has not been resolved.
The raid came as Puntland’s forces stepped up action against piracy. Days earlier, they retook another tanker, Sibu 1, but 28 of the 41 suspects arrested in that operation later escaped while being moved to jail, and several Puntland officials accused local police of complicity. The EU naval force Operation Atalanta has recorded 10 piracy-related incidents so far this year, eight of them since April.
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