Somali pirates said Thursday they had released a Greek cargo vessel and its Ukrainian crew after a payment of $3.7 million more than six months after it was captured.
Somali pirates said Thursday they had released a Greek cargo vessel and its Ukrainian crew after a payment of $3.7 million more than six months after it was captured.

"After serious negotiations over the past four days, the Ariana is free after the payment of $3.7 million," pirate Ahmed Abdullahi Mohamoud told AFP.

"The owners of the ship were joking for a while without understanding the seriousness of the situation," he said by phone from Harardhere, a pirate den in northern Somalia .

Another pirate, Abdi Mohamoud, said the captors had demanded $5 million to release the cargo vessel "but they settled for this amount."

He said nobody on board the ship had been harmed.

The Maltese-flagged MV Ariana was seized north of Madagascar on May 2 while on its way to the Middle East from Brazil . It was carrying 10,000 metric tons of soya beans.

The ship is owned by the Athens-based All Ocean Shipping company, which is in turn owned by a U.K. conglomerate.

Last month, the families of the 24-strong Ukrainian crew pleaded for their release, calling on the ship owners and the pirates to speed up negotiations. One of the two female crew members was reported to be seriously ill and risked death without proper medical treatment, a Ukrainian doctor told AFP during a phone interview with the crew in August.

Her conditions wasn't immediately known Thursday.

With the end of monsoon season last month, Somali pirates have resumed hijackings, attacking foreign vessels in the Indian Ocean where they have shifted since the deployment of international naval forces in the Gulf of Aden .

Since January, 160 acts of piracy have been reported off the coast of Somalia , including 34 hijacked vessels and more than 450 people taken hostage, according to the U.N.'s International Maritime Organization.

Διαβάστε ακόμα