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 two pirates were wounded and the rest detained, and that the crew and the cargo were safe. 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 statement said its maritime forces had seized the Honour 25 from the group holding it off the Bandarbeyla coast, that two pirates were wounded and that the remaining suspects were arrested. The first reports on Tuesday described the result as preliminary success, and later accounts said some members of the group had left the ship after talks with Puntland before the force moved in. One Somali-language account spoke of casualties on both sides, and Puntland’s own statement named only the two wounded pirates. No photograph of the boarding had been published by Tuesday afternoon, and Puntland had not said where the prisoners were being held.
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.
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, and by late July a Karachi-based welfare trust was complaining that nearly a hundred days had passed without concrete action from Pakistan’s own government.
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 by Tuesday afternoon Islamabad had made no statement on the operation at Dharinbaar.
Egypt has been waiting on the same federal channel for the Eureka, whose eight Egyptian sailors have been held since 2 May. Its foreign minister took the case to the Arab League in Cairo on 7 September, and the ship is still held. 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 returned sailors from India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Sri Lanka among others. 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 freed two of the five ships President Said Abdullahi Deni counted off its shores on 9 September, and both the Sibu 1 and the Honour 25 were taken back by force.
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, and Puntland’s statement said the suspects arrested there were in its hands and the seventeen crew unharmed. 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. The Eureka and the Asana, seized on 2 May and 17 July, remain in pirate hands, 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 on a ship whose captain names a Dubai company as the owner on the papers and which a Puntland businessman says is his, and the federal ministries that spent the summer on the telephone with Islamabad had said nothing about the operation by Tuesday 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. Ten Pakistani families who had heard nothing from the ship since June were waiting on their own government for the first word that their men were free.
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, freed it with a force the federal government does not command, and Puntland now holds the pirates who held the ship.
