KARACHI: Some family members of Pakistani sailors, who have been held hostage by Somali pirates aboard the MT Honour 25 for more than four months, were briefly detained on Monday morning while they were staging a sit-in at Karachi’s Sharea Faisal.
The MT Honour 25, a Palau-flagged oil tanker, was hijacked by armed pirates off the coast of Puntland, Somalia, on April 21. Besides 10 crew members from Pakistan, the hostages include seamen from Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka.
During more than four months of their captivity, no significant progress has been reported either in negotiations or in the payment of the ransom, said to be around $3 million, for their recovery.
Their families have staged protests for their recovery multiple times.
On Sunday, they began an overnight sit-in at Sharea Faisal outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ (Mofa) liaison office and planned to march to the Supreme Court registry on Monday morning. But police reached the protest site before that and detained some of them.
They were later released, the wife of one of the hostages confirmed to Dawn in the afternoon.
“They were taken to the police station and kept there for a long time, and the police were not allowing us to see them. The police misbehaved with us and told us to go away,” said Ayesha Ameen, whose husband, Ameen Bin Shams, was a fitter on the hijacked ship.
“They were arrested around 7:45am,” added Ayesha, who was not detained by police.
She said that the protesters were taken to the Tipu Sultan police station and alleged that 11 protesters were detained, including “underage individuals”.
A police official, who requested anonymity, also confirmed that the detained individuals had been released.
A senior police officer, who wished not to be named, denied that any protester was arrested. He said if there had been an arrest, it would have been mentioned in the police’s roznamcha (logbook).
Instead, the officer asserted that the police had engaged the protestors since Sunday night.
He said police officers had tried to persuade the families to vacate the place when they gathered at the Mofa office and asked them to hold their protest at a designated venue such as Karachi Press Club.
