By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD/KARACHI: Pakistan said on Wednesday it was working to repatriate the bodies of three sailors killed by Somali pirates, and to bring home the survivors of the hijacked oil tanker MT Honour 25, a day after Puntland forces retook the vessel following five months of captivity.
The Foreign Office named the dead as Rafi Ullah Khan, Syed Kashif Umer and Mahmood Ahmed Ansari. It said four crew members were injured, three of them Pakistani, and were receiving medical care in a nearby hospital. The surviving crew had been brought ashore at Bandar Beyla, in Puntland, and officials from Pakistan’s embassy in Djibouti were travelling there to assist them.
“Every possible effort is being made to ensure proper medical care for the injured, facilitate the transportation of the mortal remains of the deceased, and ensure the safe return of the surviving Pakistani crew members,” the ministry said. It added that it was in close contact with Somali authorities and other stakeholders, and extended the “deepest condolences” of the government and people of Pakistan to the bereaved families.
Relatives of the dead told local media, however, that no government representative had contacted them since the deaths. Families of Umer, Ansari and Khan said they had repeatedly raised concerns for the men’s safety without securing their release, and appealed to Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar and President Asif Ali Zardari to arrange the return of the bodies. Khan’s relatives said he had been aboard the vessel for about ten months, six of them in captivity.
Ansar Burney, whose welfare trust had been in contact with the crew and, at one point, the pirates, confirmed the casualties and said his organisation had repeatedly warned the authorities about the threat to the men’s lives. He called for the injured to be returned safely and the bodies handed to their families. The trust said the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) had contacted it after the operation and promised co-operation in returning the injured and the dead to their home countries.
Killed before the operation began
The Puntland Maritime Police Force said the pirates killed five crew members before its naval and ground units moved on the tanker in the Dharin-Bar area of Bandar Beyla district on Tuesday. Besides the three Pakistanis, it said, an Indian and a Myanmar national were killed. It did not identify them or say exactly when they died.
“The vessel is now safe and under Puntland Government control,” the force said on X, adding that 21 suspected pirates had been arrested and a search for others was continuing. A separate statement from Puntland’s information ministry put the number of suspects held at 16.
The deaths appear to be the first at the hands of Somali pirates in more than a decade.
Two Pakistani survivors, Hussain Yousuf and Imran Ali, phoned the Ansar Burney Welfare Trust in Karachi on the captain’s mobile, according to the trust. They said the pirates killed the five men and wounded four more as they fled the maritime police. Puntland has not independently confirmed that account. A trust lawyer said the fleeing pirates also damaged the tanker’s steering, leaving it unable to move, and that a Somali naval vessel began towing it towards shore.
Umer, the vessel’s second officer, was from the Buffer Zone area of Karachi and had spent 25 years in the merchant navy. Neighbours began visiting his home to offer condolences after news of his death emerged. The trust said that in their last conversation he had told it that food, drinking water and other supplies aboard were running out.
Months of stalemate
The Palau-flagged tanker was seized on 21 April about 30 nautical miles off the Puntland coast, carrying roughly 18,500 barrels of oil. Pakistani reports say 17 people were aboard, ten of them Pakistanis, though some accounts give 19.
Negotiations made no headway. The pirates were reported to have demanded $3m at first, later cutting the figure to $1.9m and then $1m, but no ransom was paid. The hostages were also said to be victims of an “ownership crisis”: it was never clearly established who owned the ship, and the man first thought to be the owner was later believed more likely to have been a middleman who hired the crew.
Over the months the sailors released a series of emotional video and audio appeals saying they had run out of clean water, food and medicine. Their families appealed to foreign governments, the United Nations and the IMO, and protested in Karachi. The Foreign Office repeatedly said it was “actively engaged” in efforts to secure their release. Last month Dar pressed the IMO’s head for “urgent and effective institutional intervention”. In July, the organisation’s secretary general, Arsenio Dominguez, called for urgent international action to free 44 seafarers held by pirates and armed robbers in the region, among them the Honour 25’s crew.
Before Tuesday’s operation, people identified as crew members had warned the welfare trust that their captors were threatening to kill hostages if security forces tried to retake the ship.
Puntland’s push against pirates
The recovery followed the release last week of the Sibu 1, a US-sanctioned tanker hijacked in August. Twenty-eight of the 41 pirates arrested in that operation later escaped while being transferred to jail, and several Puntland security officials accused local police of collusion. A third vessel, the Eureka, hijacked in May while anchored at Qana port in Yemen, has also been recovered after pirates grounded and abandoned it. On 29 September the Puntland Navy said it was stepping up operations to secure the region’s beaches.
Puntland’s fisheries minister, Mohamed Abdulkadir Salah, told Al Jazeera that many had questioned the region’s ability to secure its own waters, and that the Honour 25 operation showed it could. Piracy off Somalia has resurged this year. IMO figures show at least 15 attacks in the Gulf of Aden and off the Somali coast since April, the highest number since 2013.
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