CAIRO, EGYPT – Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty pressed Somalia’s foreign minister Abdisalam Abdi Ali on Monday 7 September to accelerate the release of the eight Egyptian sailors held aboard the tanker Eureka, raising the case on the sidelines of the 166th session of the Arab League Council at ministerial level. No Somali authority can simply go and take the men back. Armed boarders took the Eureka off Yemen’s Shabwa coast on 2 May and anchored it in Somali territorial waters near Puntland, where it has sat for more than four months while the ransom demand moved from three million dollars to ten and back down to two. Four other merchant ships are held on the same stretch of coastline.
Four Months Aboard the Eureka
Twelve men were on board when the boarders came over the side on the morning of 2 May, eight of them Egyptian and four Indian. The 88-metre product tanker was still riding at anchor off Yemen’s Shabwa province when it happened, having left Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates with a cargo of oil products and Bosaso declared as its destination. Its last automatic identification signal was recorded on 30 April off Mukalla on the southern Yemeni coast, after which the vessel dropped off the electronic charts and never reappeared. One of the attackers took the bridge and turned the ship south across the Gulf of Aden, into Somali waters near Puntland, where it has remained ever since.
The hijackers demanded three million dollars the day after the seizure, then cut the food and water aboard the Eureka and raised the figure to ten million when the owner declined to answer calls from the crew’s families. On 18 May a video showed three of the crew kneeling on deck with their hands bound while armed men fired over their heads. Negotiators reached a preliminary agreement of two million dollars on 12 June, which collapsed within days once the hijackers demanded that the cash be flown out and airdropped at sea. By the end of that month they had set a seventy-two hour deadline and threatened to begin shooting. The head of Egypt’s maritime officers syndicate said in mid-June that all twelve were alive, and warned against any rescue attempt by Somali forces or peacekeepers.
Ownership of the tanker runs through a company registered in the Marshall Islands whose listed address sits in the United Arab Emirates and whose email domain belongs to an Emirati fuel trading firm. An investigation into the voyage and the contracts behind it also found no record of insurance covering the crew. That same firm had two vessels barred from Emirati ports and waters by a 2024 ministerial decision over the unlicensed transport of petroleum products, one of them later renamed Eureka. Cairo has pursued the case through Sanaa as well, on the understanding that the owner is Yemeni, while the families who tracked him down reached a man living in the Emirates.
Five Ships Held on One Stretch of Coast
MT Honour 25, a Palau-flagged tanker taken on 21 April off northern Somalia while bound for Mogadishu, has been held longer than any of the others. Seventeen crew are aboard her, most of them Pakistani nationals. The MV Sward followed on 26 April, a Saint Kitts and Nevis flagged cargo ship carrying fertiliser to Mombasa when it was seized six nautical miles off Garacad. Its captors have since converted it into a mothership, a floating base from which skiffs are launched at vessels far offshore. The Eureka came third on 2 May, the Tanzania-flagged MT Asana fourth on 17 July some sixty-five nautical miles southwest of Mukalla, and the Eritrea-flagged Seamull fifth on 20 August inside the internationally recommended transit corridor.
Five merchant vessels remained in pirate hands at the start of September. The joint centre that grades maritime threat across the region held the Gulf of Aden at substantial and cautioned that pirate action groups retain the ability to board and divert merchant ships in coastal Somali waters and in the transit corridor alike. The International Maritime Organization counted more than ninety seafarers in captivity in late August, when a sixth vessel was still on its list. Its secretary general demanded their immediate and unconditional release from waters he described as becoming too dangerous for seafarers. Fifteen attacks were logged in the first eight months of the year, eight of them in the Gulf of Aden since May.
Washington and Israel have been at war with Iran since late February, and Tehran has intermittently controlled passage through the Strait of Hormuz. The warships that once patrolled the approaches to the Somali basin have been pulled north towards that emergency. The European Union’s Operation Atalanta now works with fewer hulls than its area demands, NATO closed its own counter-piracy mission in 2016, and the international structure sustaining Somalia’s own security effort has been losing its logistics before anyone funded the exit. Somali piracy peaked in 2011 at 237 recorded attacks and was beaten down by a naval coalition that no longer exists in that form. Three of the five ships now held, the Honour 25, the Sward and the Eureka, were seized within eleven days of each other this spring.
Puntland Polices the Coast Where the Eureka Sits
Mohamed Jama, commander of the Puntland Coast Guard, said on Monday 7 September that the groups working off the region now have the speed, range and firepower to strike well beyond the shoreline. Fast boats, anti-aircraft guns and missiles are among their equipment, and the men operating them are linked to criminal networks in Yemen. That connection is what lets some of them work closer to the Yemeni coast and hijack more successfully, which is precisely the route the Eureka travelled, seized off Shabwa and brought back across the gulf. A state minister in the Puntland government has made the same point more cautiously, saying there is definitely a connection while the pieces still have to be assembled into a clearer picture.
Puntland’s Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources warned on 24 August that ransom payments would supply pirate groups with both the resources and the incentive to keep operating, and would draw fresh recruits into maritime criminal networks. The ministry said it was tracking the rise in attacks along the coastline and that maritime security operations had been reinforced. Preliminary information gathered by its own agencies pointed to outside groups trying to reactivate men previously involved in piracy by offering them money. Puntland asked shipowners, shipping companies and insurers whose vessels face hijacking to work through its authorities, and committed itself to acting against any individual or network found responsible.
President Said Abdullahi Deni signed a maritime security agreement with a visiting United States military delegation at Bosaso in early August. His administration has spent the year fighting Islamic State in the Calmiskaad range while running the ordinary business of a coastal government, down to putting every armed technical in Bari under his own signature. President Said Abdullahi Deni has also argued that the revival of piracy is being used to damage Puntland’s reputation, and his government has asked for deeper naval cooperation with the European Union, the United States and regional partners to close the gap at sea. The Eureka lies inside the water that administration patrols, and the request to free its crew was addressed in Cairo to Mogadishu.
Mogadishu Answers the Eureka With a Bill and an Accusation
Somalia’s Upper House approved an anti-piracy and anti-abduction bill on Wednesday 9 September, twenty-nine senators voting in favour and none against. The vote came four months and one week after the Eureka was boarded. The legislation, submitted by the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, is meant to strengthen the legal framework and the role of state institutions in responding to hijackings and kidnappings. No clause in it moves a tanker anchored off Puntland, and no clause in it puts a hull at sea.
Defence Minister Ahmed Moallim Fiqi told a national internal security conference in Mogadishu on Tuesday 1 September that President Said Abdullahi Deni had issued a statement defending pirates and telling those holding ships to demand money as well. He urged the governments and owners of the held vessels to refuse payment. Every dollar paid would finance the criminal activity and encourage further hijackings, he said, adding that the identities and locations of those involved were known. Puntland had published its own objection to ransom payments a week earlier, in the same terms, through the fisheries ministry.
Fiqi’s accusation followed the dispute over the MV Lutuf, seized on 17 August off Jiifle and reported freed on 29 August by Turkish naval forces working with the Somali army. Mogadishu said the ten-day pursuit killed fourteen pirates and destroyed four boats. Puntland’s Ministry of Security rejected that account outright and said the vessel had been released after money changed hands, two and a half million dollars of it, and then went further by naming federal officials as the brokers of the payment. Neither version has been independently verified.
The crew of the Eureka have spent their captivity inside a year in which federal forces were committed against Jubaland, a succession was managed in Baidoa, and Villa Somalia argued with Garowe over who commands the men who might have gone out to get them. Egypt will keep asking in Cairo, because the state it is obliged to ask has spent its army and its attention on its own federal members while the naval coalition that once answered these questions sailed north to the Gulf.
