Four Survivors of the MT Honour 25 Hijacking Are Coming Home. Three Others Are Coming Back in Coffins.

Four of the ten Pakistani sailors who survived the five-month hijacking of the oil tanker MT Honour 25 are scheduled to land in Karachi on October 3, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said on October 2 — even as the Foreign Office works separately to bring home the bodies of three Pakistani crew members the pirates killed days before the ship was finally freed.

From five months captive to a flight home

The Palau-flagged tanker was seized by armed Somali pirates on April 21 roughly 30 nautical miles off Puntland's coast, with 17 crew aboard, 10 of them Pakistani. We covered the ordeal's violent end in detail: as Puntland's Maritime Police Force closed in on September 29, the pirates killed five hostages — Pakistani second officer Kashif Umar, third engineer Mahmood Ansari and oiler Rafiullah Khan, along with an Indian crew member and the vessel's Myanmar chief engineer — and wounded four more, including three more Pakistanis, before the ship was retaken and 21 suspected pirates captured.

Dar's October 2 statement did not name the four crew members set to arrive in Karachi, but he described them as having been "safely retrieved." Earlier reporting on the ship's recovery identified three unharmed Pakistani sailors — Hussain Yousuf, Imran Ali and Yaseen — among the survivors, consistent with a group of Pakistanis who escaped the final assault without injury.

Two different homecomings

What Dar's announcement makes clear is that the ten surviving and deceased Pakistanis are not coming home together, or on the same timeline. The four "safely retrieved" crew members are making a comparatively straightforward trip back to Karachi. The three who died are not: the Foreign Office has said it is facilitating the repatriation of their bodies "at the earliest," and has expressed condolences over the deaths of all five crew members killed in the operation, not only the Pakistanis among them. Families of the three dead sailors have been reported waiting for that process to conclude. The status of the three Pakistanis wounded in the same assault — whether they remain under medical care in Somalia or the region, or are also travelling home — has not been spelled out in official statements, and this piece will be updated once that is confirmed.

Why this took five months, and why it still isn't over

The underlying case is a reminder of how little leverage Pakistan has once its nationals are taken by pirates operating out of semi-autonomous Puntland, beyond diplomatic pressure and waiting out a ransom negotiation. The pirates initially demanded $3 million for the crew's release, later lowering that to $1 million, while the ship sat under their control for more than five months. Dar had raised the case with the International Maritime Organisation's head in September, pressing for "urgent and effective institutional intervention" — intervention that ultimately came from Puntland's own Maritime Police Force rather than any international body, and arrived too late for five of the seventeen men aboard.

For the families of Hussain Yousuf, Imran Ali, Yaseen and the fourth unnamed survivor, October 3 ends a wait that started in April. For the families of Kashif Umar, Mahmood Ansari and Rafiullah Khan, the wait continues, now measured in the time it takes to bring a body home rather than to free a hostage.

Build Better Pakistan's Security Desk covers Pakistan's maritime security and counter-narcotics operations and will update this piece if further details are released.