The 26 Asian hostages are now released by Somali pirates, after five years of their captivity. The fishing vessel was hijacked; the last commercial ship which was seized at the height of the country’s piracy scourge, negotiators stated on Saturday.
The crew of the Naham 3, were taken captive when their Omani-flagged vessel was seized in March 2012 south of the Seychelles. They were held hostage for the second longest by Somali pirates.
John Steed, coordinator of the Hostage Support Partner (HSP), who helped to negotiate their release, with his added joy, “revealed the release of the Naham 3 crew early this morning.”
“He is a retired British army colonel, who has presented his mission of saving the forgotten hostages.” He told AFP about his mission to help the crew to return to their families but still there is one obstacle. The city of Galkayo is in an erratic situation, where the fights between forces with the wrathful purpose from rival regional states of Puntland and Galmudug is going on, and to extract them from this city is quite a challenge.
“Clashes in Galkayo have left at least 11 dead and more than 50,000 displaced this month,” the UN humanitarian agency said last week.
Steed said, “The crew was in the egregious condition. They were malnourished and one among them was suffering from diabetes and the other had a bullet wound in his foot.”
The another statement that came up from Oceans Beyond Piracy(OBP) is that, “Initially pirates took 29 crew hostages, in which one person died when the hijack happened and the other two, who failed to resist pressure of the negative force during their captivity, landed into illness.”
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Somali pirates in 2005, hijacked the first major commercial vessel, the activity which flourished in the country. It was rend of the civil war, with no central government to fall into place and with few jobs.
For the International shipping, piracy became the threat to them and so, the commercial vessels during its voyage, hired the armed guards at the time they took their vessels abroad.
According to the OBP, while overall numbers are down in the western Indian Ocean. In the year 2015, pirates in this region attacked at least 306 seafarers.