Karachi police briefly detain protesting family members of Pakistani sailors held hostage by Somali pirates

KARACHI: Some family members of Pakistani sailors, who have been held hostage by Somali pirates aboard the MT Honour 25 for more than four months, were briefly detained on Monday morning while they were staging a sit-in at Karachi’s Sharea Faisal. The MT Honour 25, a Palau-flagged oil tanker, was hijacked by armed pirates off the coast of Puntland, Somalia, on April 21. Besides 10 crew members from Pakistan, the hostages include seamen from Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka.

During more than four months of their captivity, no significant progress has been reported either in negotiations or in the payment of the ransom, said to be around $3 million, for their recovery. Their families have staged protests for their recovery multiple times. On Sunday, they began an overnight sit-in at Sharea Faisal outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ (Mofa) liaison office and planned to march to the Supreme Court registry on Monday morning. But police reached the protest site before that and detained some of them. They were later released, the wife of one of the hostages confirmed to Dawn in the afternoon. “They were taken to the police station and kept there for a long time, and the police were…