Somali Pirates Warned They Would Kill Hostages If Anyone Tried a Rescue. Puntland Tried One Anyway, and Five Crew Members Are Now Dead.

Abstract: Puntland's Maritime Police Force (PMPF) said on 29 September that it had freed the Palau-flagged tanker Honour 25 in a planned raid in the Dharin-Bar area of Bandar Beyla district, more than five months after pirates seized the vessel and its 17 crew off Puntland's coast on 21 April. By the time forces reached the ship, pirates had already killed five crew members, three Pakistani nationals, one from Myanmar and one Indian, and wounded four more, three Pakistani and one Indian. Multiple outlets, citing Reuters, described the deaths as the first inflicted by Somali pirates on a hijacked crew in more than a decade, a marker that separates this hijacking from the ransom-and-release pattern that has defined Somali piracy since its 2008-2014 peak and its return this year. The killings followed a specific, on-the-record warning: the ship's Indonesian captain, Ashari Samadikun, radioed on 24 and 25 September that his captors were "repeatedly" threatening the crew with firearms and would kill them if "any attack or military operation" was conducted against the vessel, a message sent to shipping monitors and relayed separately by crew members to the Pakistani NGO Ansar Burney Trust. That warning came days after PMPF forces, in a operation Puntland says involved no outside help, freed a second hijacked tanker, the US-sanctioned Sibu 1, anchored nearby, an operation Iraq's Al-Shaghanba tribe says its own 40 armed members actually carried out. The two rescues, five days apart, are the third and fourth resolutions of a wave of six commercial hijackings off Somalia since April, following the contested 30 August release of the cargo vessel MV Lutuf, and they arrive as Puntland's regional government and Somalia's federal government continue to publicly accuse each other over who is responsible for the ransom economy the hijackings feed.

A warning that named the exact trigger

What makes the Honour 25 deaths different from prior hijackings this year is that the crew did not simply disappear into months of silence before being freed or killed; they described, in advance and in specific terms, what would set the killing off. Captain Ashari Samadikun, an Indonesian national commanding a crew that included ten Pakistani nationals, had already sent a recorded distress video on 16 June describing the crew's condition as "extremely critical," with several members suffering from diabetes and untreated infections and the group surviving on "plain white rice and contaminated water" after, he said, the ship's own management company failed to send assistance. On 24 and 25 September, a fresh message reached monitors: the pirates, Samadikun said, "have repeatedly threatened the crew of MT Honour 25 with firearms, stating that they will kill us if any attack or military operation is conducted against our vessel." Crew members separately contacted the Ansar Burney Trust, a Pakistani human-rights organisation that has previously intervened in Somali piracy cases, with the same warning. Both messages went out in the same 48 hours in which Puntland's own forces were completing a raid on the Sibu 1, a hijacked tanker anchored near the Honour 25, precisely the kind of "military operation" the pirates had said would get the crew killed.

What PMPF forces found at Dharin-Bar

Puntland's Information Ministry said the 29 September operation in the Dharin-Bar area of Bandar Beyla district, in Puntland's Nugaal region, was "a planned operation" involving both naval and ground units. By the time forces reached the tanker, five of the seventeen crew were already dead: three Pakistani nationals, one from Myanmar and one Indian. Four more crew, three Pakistani and one Indian, had been wounded. The remaining crew were freed. Puntland's own account of how many suspected pirates were captured is not internally consistent across the statements different outlets relied on: some reports citing the Information Ministry put the figure at 16, while others citing the same ministry, including Somali Guardian and Dawan, put it at 21, with additional suspects reported to have fled onshore and pursuit continuing. Neither figure has been reconciled publicly. The tanker itself, chartered by Puntland businesspeople and carrying roughly 18,500 barrels of petroleum products, had been sailing toward Mogadishu when it was hijacked roughly 30 nautical miles off Puntland's coast on 21 April, one of six commercial vessels seized off Somalia since that date.

A second rescue five days earlier, and a third with disputed credit

The Honour 25 raid was not Puntland's only counter-piracy operation that week. On 25 September, Puntland forces said they had freed the tanker Sibu 1, seized by pirates in the Gulf of Aden on 20 August, after a 48-hour operation off the coast of Mudug; all 20 crew, sixteen Indian nationals, two Syrians, one Iraqi and one Sudanese, were reported safe. The Sibu 1 is not an ordinary hijacked vessel: it was placed under US Treasury sanctions in 2025 over allegations it belonged to a shadow fleet moving Iranian petroleum products in breach of American sanctions, and it is managed by the UAE-based Qatrat Alnada Almasi Ship Management. Puntland's account credits its own maritime forces with the rescue and says the operation resulted in dozens of suspected pirates captured. A rival account, from Iraq's Al-Shaghanba tribe in Basra Governorate, says roughly 40 of its own members travelled to the Gulf of Aden and fought a five-hour gun battle with the pirates holding the vessel, which the tribe says belongs to an Iraqi merchant from its own ranks, killing or wounding several pirates and capturing seven. Puntland's Maritime Police Force has not addressed the tribal account. The pattern is not new: the cargo vessel MV Lutuf, hijacked on 17 August near Mareeyo in Puntland's Eyl district, was freed on 30 August under two irreconcilable accounts of its own, Somalia's federal Defence Ministry credited a ten-day Turkish-Somali military operation that destroyed four pirate boats and killed fourteen suspected pirates, while Puntland's Ministry of Security said the pirates released the ship voluntarily after receiving a ransom whose payment federal officials had facilitated by phone since the day of the hijacking. Three rescues in five weeks, and three separate, unresolved disputes over who actually carried each one out.

Why the killing, now, after a decade without it

FIKIR Institute's 23 August analysis of Somalia's piracy resurgence documented the International Maritime Bureau's own account of why hijackings returned this year after a decade of near-total suppression: naval assets that once concentrated on Gulf of Aden counter-piracy patrols have been pulled toward the Houthi blockade of Saudi Arabia and the wider US-Iran war closing the Strait of Hormuz, leaving a patrol gap pirates have exploited to seize six commercial vessels since April, the worst run since the piracy wave that peaked in 2008-2014. That naval diversion explains why hijackings resumed; it does not by itself explain why hostages are now being killed rather than held for ransom, the strategy that defined Somali piracy's economics for over a decade because dead hostages generate no payout. The sequence around the Honour 25 suggests a different, narrower mechanism: pirates explicitly tied the threat to a rescue attempt, and the killing followed within days of Puntland's own forces demonstrating, at the Sibu 1, that rescue attempts against hijacked vessels anchored in the same stretch of Puntland coastline were both being planned and succeeding. If that sequence holds up under further reporting, an intensifying pace of Puntland-led rescues, itself a response to this year's hijacking wave, may be generating a new and lethal form of deterrence-by-threat among the pirates still holding vessels, a dynamic the ransom-based piracy of the 2008-2014 era did not need. Global figures add scale to the shift: the International Maritime Organization recorded 171 piracy and armed-robbery incidents worldwide in 2025, up seventeen percent from 146 in 2024, and Somalia's own coastal youth have fewer legal alternatives to piracy than at any point in years after US development assistance to the country collapsed from roughly $476 million in 2024 to $3 million in the first quarter of 2026, a funding collapse FIKIR Institute has previously documented.

The federal-Puntland argument the deaths land inside

The Honour 25 and Sibu 1 rescues arrive in the middle of an unresolved political dispute between Mogadishu and Garowe over how piracy off Puntland's coast should be handled at all. On 1 September, Somalia's Defence Minister, Ahmed Moallim Fiqi, accused Puntland President Said Abdullahi Deni of encouraging pirates to demand ransom, telling a national security conference in Mogadishu that Deni had issued a statement "defending the pirates, saying that they received money, and telling those who are holding ships to demand money as well," and warning that "every dollar you pay to the pirates will further finance this criminal activity." The accusation followed the disputed resolution of the MV Lutuf hijacking, in which Puntland's own government said a ransom had been paid with federal officials' knowledge, the same ransom-versus-military-operation dispute now echoing in the competing PMPF and Al-Shaghanba accounts of the Sibu 1 rescue. FIKIR Institute's 25 August analysis of the earlier Turkish-linked drone strike near Garmaal, which killed four men Puntland says were civilian fishermen rather than the pirates the strike was reportedly aimed at protecting a hijacked vessel from, documented the same underlying pattern: a week or more of federal non-confirmation following a lethal incident off Puntland's coast, while Puntland and Mogadishu each accuse the other of mishandling the response. The Honour 25 deaths, the first fatal outcome for hostages themselves rather than for alleged pirates or fishermen, have not yet produced a public statement from either government beyond Puntland's own operational account.

What to watch

Three signals will show whether the Honour 25 killings mark an isolated tragedy or a shift in how this year's hijackings are likely to end. First, whether Puntland or Somalia's federal government reconciles the conflicting pirate-capture figures, 16 against 21, or otherwise clarifies what happened aboard the tanker before its forces arrived, since neither government has yet addressed the discrepancy directly. Second, whether pirates still holding the remaining vessels from this year's wave, the tanker Sward, the Eureka and the Asana among those hijacked before the Lutuf and Sibu 1, issue similar threats tying hostage safety to any rescue attempt, which would confirm the Honour 25 warning was a broader shift in pirate tactics rather than an isolated statement from one crew. Third, whether the International Maritime Bureau, EU NAVFOR Atalanta or UKMTO issue their own assessment of the deaths, given that none of the three had done so publicly as of this writing despite each having tracked the Honour 25 hijacking since April.

Policy implications

For Puntland's Maritime Police Force, a UAE-funded unit that receives an estimated $50 million a year in training, equipment and salaries, two tanker rescues in five days demonstrate real operational capacity, but the Honour 25 deaths raise a harder question the force has not yet answered: whether its own increasing tempo of raids is now a contributing factor in pirates' willingness to kill hostages, given the explicit link the Honour 25 captain drew between rescue attempts and the threat to his crew. For Somalia's federal government, the dispute with Puntland over ransom payments, sharpened by Minister Fiqi's early-September accusation against President Deni, will be harder to sustain in its current terms once a rescue-versus-ransom choice has a documented body count attached to the rescue option, a trade-off neither government's public statements have yet acknowledged. For the international naval presence off the Horn of Africa, the killings are the clearest evidence yet that the patrol gap FIKIR Institute has tracked since August, created by warships redirected to the Red Sea blockade and the Iran war, carries a cost measured now in hostage lives rather than only in seized cargo and ransom payments. For the Iraqi, Pakistani, Indian, Syrian, Sudanese and Myanmar governments whose nationals crewed the Honour 25 and Sibu 1, the competing PMPF and Al-Shaghanba accounts of who actually freed Sibu 1's crew, like the earlier dispute over MV Lutuf, leave basic accountability for their citizens' safety resting on which of two contradictory Somali and foreign-tribal accounts each government chooses to believe.