BANDARBEYLA, SOMALIA – The Puntland Maritime Police Force took back the Palau-flagged tanker Honour 25 from the pirates who had held it since 21 April, in an operation at Dharinbaar in the Bandarbeyla district of Karkaar that Puntland announced on Tuesday 29 September, four days after the same force freed the Sibu 1 off Mudug. Puntland said the pirates had killed five of the crew, three Pakistanis, an Indian and a Myanmar national, before its force moved in, and that four more were wounded. The Honour 25 was carrying about 18,500 barrels of gasoline to Mogadishu with seventeen men aboard, ten of them Pakistani, and for five months the federal government’s visible part in the case had been its assurances to Islamabad.
What Puntland Says Happened at Dharinbaar
Puntland’s first statement on Tuesday said its maritime forces had seized the Honour 25 from the group holding it off the Bandarbeyla coast and named only two wounded pirates. Later on Tuesday Puntland said the pirates had killed five of the crew before the operation began, that four more had been wounded and that sixteen members of the group had been detained at Dharinbaar.
Two Pakistani survivors have since given a Karachi welfare trust a different sequence, in which the pirates opened fire on the hostages as they retreated from the ship under pressure from Puntland’s forces, and neither account has been independently verified. Pakistan’s Foreign Office confirmed on Wednesday 30 September that three of the dead were its nationals, Rafiullah Khan, Syed Kashif Umer and Mahmood Ahmed Ansari, and said the surviving crew had been brought ashore at Bandarbeyla, with the four wounded, three of them Pakistani, in a nearby hospital.
The Honour 25 is a small product tanker of about 3,000 deadweight tonnes. Pirates boarded it on Tuesday 21 April roughly thirty nautical miles off Puntland while it sailed for Mogadishu, and the European Union’s naval force confirmed the hijacking six days later, reporting that the ship had been moved south into Somali territorial waters with all seventeen crew unharmed. By May it was anchored off Eyl. When the Puntland Maritime Police Force moved on it, the Honour 25 had been in the group’s hands for 161 days, longer than the 138 days the cement carrier Sward spent near Garacad before a ransom bought its release on 11 September.
The crew are ten Pakistanis, four Indonesians including the captain, a Sri Lankan, a Myanmar national and an Indian. Their families in Karachi said the men had run short of drinking water, were living on boiled rice and had no medicine, and that contact with the ship had been cut since mid-June. On 25 September, the day the Sibu 1 was freed, the captain sent a message, relayed by a Karachi welfare trust, warning that the pirates had repeatedly threatened the crew with firearms and said they would kill them if any military operation was attempted. Four days later, five of the men he had spoken for were dead at Dharinbaar.
What Mogadishu Told Islamabad About the Honour 25
On Tuesday 9 June Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Ishaq Dar, telephoned Somalia’s Foreign Minister, Abdisalam Abdi Ali, about the ten Pakistanis, and Abdisalam Abdi Ali replied that the federal government was making serious, ongoing efforts to free the hostages as soon as possible. The two ministers agreed to stay in close coordination until the case was resolved. Pakistani diplomats from the embassy in Djibouti travelled to Mogadishu to gather information, and Islamabad kept in contact with the federal authorities and with the man who says he owns the ship. None of that produced a release of the Honour 25 over the following sixteen weeks.
The Honour 25 is claimed by Osman Shire Quud, a businessman from Puntland, who has said the cargo was fuel for Mogadishu. The captain, Ashari Samadikun, said in remarks relayed to Pakistani media that the ship’s papers name a different owner, a chartering company registered in Dubai, and that no one called Osman appears in them, and the pirates were reported to reject Osman’s standing to negotiate. Reports put the ransom the pirates demanded for the Honour 25 at $3 million in some accounts and $1.9 million in others. Pakistan’s Foreign Office, which named the Ministry of Human Rights as its focal point for the case, said in September that it had not received the captain’s latest warning, and it confirmed the deaths only on Wednesday 30 September, a day after the operation at Dharinbaar.
Egypt had been waiting on the same federal channel for the Eureka, whose eight Egyptian sailors were held from 2 May, and its foreign minister took the case to the Arab League in Cairo on 7 September. On the day of the Dharinbaar operation the gang holding the Eureka ran the tanker aground at Hulcaanood, put its twelve crew ashore and escaped, and Cairo announced their release the next day. On 6 September the federal foreign ministry described piracy as a problem off the coast of Puntland and claimed leadership of every maritime security arrangement in the country. Moreover, Villa Somalia’s earlier claim of a naval rescue, the release of the MV Lutuf on 29 August, was answered by Puntland’s security ministry, which said it had monitored calls between federal officials and the hijackers over a ransom.
The Honour 25 and the Sibu 1 in One Week
On Friday 25 September the same force freed the Sibu 1 between Garacad and Hobyo after two days of fighting, killing one pirate, wounding four and taking fifteen prisoner, with the twenty crew safe. The Sibu 1 had carried a United States Treasury designation since December 2025 for moving Iranian petroleum products, and its crew was mostly Indian, so Puntland’s two operations in one week brought out sailors from India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. Between them the two operations took back a tanker seized off Yemen in August and a tanker seized off Puntland in April, one held off Mudug and the other off Karkaar. Puntland has now taken back two of the five ships President Said Abdullahi Deni counted off its shores on 9 September, both by force, and a third, the Eureka, was abandoned by its captors on the Karkaar coast the same Tuesday.
President Said Abdullahi Deni told the people of Xaafuun that evening that the pirates would be fought the way Puntland fought Daesh in the Calmiskaad mountains. Accordingly, both operations followed that pledge, and both came while Puntland’s letter of 13 September to the Security Council asked for international cooperation against piracy that works directly with its own maritime and land forces. The Council takes up Somalia in October, with the federal government holding one of its seats until the end of 2026.
Reports on 27 September said several of the men captured on the Sibu 1 escaped from a convoy near Jariiban while being moved from Garacad to Garowe, with the number put anywhere from nineteen to twenty-eight, and Puntland has issued no statement on them. Two days later its maritime police were aboard the Honour 25 at Dharinbaar, where Puntland said sixteen suspects were detained and where five of the seventeen crew had already been killed. The Honour 25 operation came four days after the Sibu 1 and was the Puntland Maritime Police Force’s second boarding of a hijacked tanker in a single week.
Where the Honour 25 Leaves the Ships Still Held
Fifteen attacks have been logged off Somalia this year, the most since 2013, and the Honour 25 was the first of the six ships hijacked since 21 April, taken five days before the Sward. The Honour 25 spent the spring at anchor off Eyl and was held off Bandarbeyla when the Puntland Maritime Police Force moved on it. In the months after its seizure, the pirate groups used captured ships as motherships, and the Sward was used to take at least two Iranian fishing vessels and the MV Lutuf before it was released. Of the six, only the Asana, seized on 17 July, is still in pirate hands. The gang holding the Eureka abandoned it at Hulcaanood on 29 September, and the MV Lutuf left the Nugaal coast on 29 August after a release Puntland says was bought.
Puntland has said nothing about who will receive the Honour 25 or its gasoline, a cargo bound for Mogadishu, and the federal ministries that spent the summer on the telephone with Islamabad had issued no statement on the operation or the deaths by Wednesday afternoon. In May, Ayesha Ameen, whose husband Ameen bin Shams is a 29-year-old fitter on the Honour 25, asked how she was supposed to tell their three-year-old daughter that her father was held captive and could not come home, and the families later took their case to the streets of Karachi. Of the ten Pakistani families who had heard nothing from the ship since June, three now have the Foreign Office’s confirmation that their men were killed at Dharinbaar, and three more have men in a hospital near the coast.
Mogadishu’s foreign ministry told the Pakistanis in June that the federal government was working to free the Honour 25 as soon as possible. Puntland, whose coast the federal foreign ministry named in September as the centre of the piracy problem, retook it with a force the federal government does not command, and Puntland now holds sixteen of the men who held the ship.
CORRECTION (30 September 2026): This article was updated on 30 September with the deaths of five Honour 25 crew at Dharinbaar and the grounding of the MT Eureka at Hulcaanood. An earlier version said the crew were safe and that the Eureka was still held.
