Claim ship owners
The 26 Bangladeshis held hostage aboard the hijacked ship MV Jahan Moni are set to be freed in three to four days.
Meherul Karim, general manager of the operating company Brave Royal Ship Management, told this to The Daily Star, adding they had agreed to pay a ransom to Somali pirates.
He, however, declined to say about the amount or the process of paying it.
The 25 crew members and the wife of the chief engineer were physically fit, he said. The pirates Thursday night emailed group photographs of the 26 to the company.
It would take couple of weeks to bring the Bangladeshis back home after their release along with the ship, he said. The ship would have to be taken to a nearby port to drop them and to send 25 substitute crew members on board.
He said they would try to take the ship to the Port of Salalah, Oman or Fujairah, UAE and they have visa issues to solve.
Officials of SR Shipping Limited, the ship’s owning company, informed the latest developments to the relatives of the crew members at its Agrabad office in Chittagong yesterday around 9:00am.
“We distributed the photographs to the families,” Meherul said.
Bilkis Rahman, mother of Engine Cadet Md Shahriar Rabbi, the youngest of hostages, told this correspondent that she was happy to see the photographs and to know that they [the 26 Bangladeshis] were doing well.
The Bangladeshi-flagged ship was captured by the Somali pirates in the Arabian Sea on December 5 last year.
Courtesy of The Daily Star
