26 Hostages Freed in Somalia

The men from the Naham 3 are all friends of mine — a crew of 26 sailors from southeast Asia who worked on a tuna long-liner flagged in Oman but owned by a company in Taiwan, which abandoned them after Somali pirates hijacked the ship in 2012. By then pirates in central Somalia had captured me, and I suppose to save money they placed me on the ship for 5 months. I’ve kept quiet about this phase of my captivity, but now, two years after my release, the men are free. I went to Nairobi this week to see them. CNN interviewed a couple of us there (see below).

They weren’t fishing illegally. Somali pirates complain about rapacious fishing by foreign trawlers, but the Naham 3 was a long-liner — not a trawler, as reported in certain magazines — fishing outside Somali territorial waters as well as Somalia’s EEZ. It was an industrial ship, but not an illegal one. If Somalia had a working navy, rather than corruption in Mogadishu and a rash of pirates, these men would not have been captured.

Twenty-six freed hostages isn’t enough — the ship had an original crew of 29. Pirates shot the captain dead when they boarded. Two crewmen I knew in 2012 died of unnamed diseases, and Arnel Balbero addresses their needless deaths in the video. Around 15 people are still held hostage by pirates in diferent parts of Somalia, but the release of this crew represents the end of the heyday of Somali piracy, since the Naham 3 was the last major vessel to be hijacked between 2005 and 2012. I couldn’t be more delighted.

Re-posted in 2018

Michael Scott Moore is a journalist and a novelist, author of a comic novel about L.A., Too Much of Nothing, as well as a travel book about surfing, Sweetness and Blood, which was named a best book of 2010 by The Economist. He’s won Fulbright, Logan, and Pulitzer Center grants for his nonfiction, as well as a Silver Nautilus Award in Journalism and Investigative Reporting; and Yaddo, MacDowell, and DeWitt Wallace–Reader’s Digest fellowships for his fiction.

He’s been a visiting professor at the Columbia School of the Arts and UC Riverside. He worked for several years as an editor and writer at Spiegel Online in Berlin. Michael was kidnapped in early 2012 on a reporting trip to Somalia and held hostage by pirates for 32 months. The Desert and the Sea, a memoir about that ordeal, became an international bestseller.

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The men from the Naham 3 are all friends of mine — a crew of 26 sailors from southeast Asia who worked on a tuna long-liner flagged in Oman but owned by a company in Taiwan, which abandoned them after Somali pirates hijacked the ship in 2012.