June 20-2014
The 11 remaining crew members—one of them Iranian—from a ship hijacked by Somali pirates have escaped almost four years of captivity after being abandoned by the ship’s Iranian owner.
The 11 men—one Iranian, one Indian, six Bangladeshis and three Sri Lankans—escaped their prison by climbing out of a window. Some news reports said they had help from some of their captors. They fled to a nearby village where hey received aid and were sent on to freedom.
The Islamic Republic’s Navy regularly boasts of driving Somali pirates off and saving Iranian ships from attacks. But the government has long ceased talking about Iranians who have been taken captive by the pirates.
The MV Albedo was captured November 26, 2010, with 23 crewmen aboard. It flew the Malaysian flag. Its owner is described as a Malaysian-based Iranian national.
The Telegraph of London reported that the owner refused to pay a ransom of $8 million and simply abandoned the ship and the crew.
Seven Pakistani nationals among the crew were freed after a Pakistani businessman paid the pirates $1.2 million for their freedom.
The freed Pakistanis told harrowing stories of mistreatment by their Somali captors. One said an Indian crewman was shot dead after the pirates had a heated argument over the phone with the Iranian owner. He said the owner had threatened to have the Indian Navy sent to attack the pirate base.
Omar Sheikh Ali Osoble, head of counter-piracy for the Galmudug regional administration in Somalia, said few of the escaped crewmen had shoes. “Some had only their underclothes, but they managed to escape through a window and reach a place of safety,” he told The Telegraph.
“We collected them and put them in a nice hotel last night. They had air-conditioning and hot water, and all of them were so happy this morning. They were not in a bad condition, but they told us stories of their experiences that were terrible.
“Some of them were beaten very badly. Sometimes they were forced to call their people at home to say they needed money to be released, and they were close to dying, and they were beaten while they were on the telephone. All of them are so happy to be free.”
The pirates now have neither the crew nor the ship. The vessel sank in a storm last summer, resulting in four of the crew drowning along with five of the pirates as they tried to get off the ship.
The 11 seamen who escaped are expected to be flown to the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, and then sent home.
“They have lost a lot of weight, but otherwise seem in reasonable health and in good spirits, which is remarkable considering what they been through,” one source told The Telegraph.
Some of the seamen were beaten with gun butts, locked in containers, and had the skin of their palms torn with pliers. At one point, the entire crew was packed into an empty swimming pool without food or water for three days. The ship’s captain, Jawad Khan, bore the brunt of the hijackers’ anger as he tried to keep them calm. On one occasion, he was tied up and lowered into the sea as pirates sprayed bullets around him.
The international anti-piracy force that patrols the Indian Ocean was unable to attempt a rescue because it feared the hostages would almost certainly be killed if they attempted to do so.
The ship was among the cases receiving assistance from Colonel John Steed, a former British military attache to Kenya and United Nation’s counter-piracy expert, who now runs the Secretariat for Regional Maritime Security, an organization that specializes in dealing with Somalia’s “forgotten” piracy cases.
While Somali piracy has decreased in the last three years due to ships using armed security, Steed told The Telegraph last year that there were around 100 hostages still languishing in pirate custody. Many have simply been abandoned by their ship’s owners.
