SOMALIA - For weeks, an unpleasant dream haunted Md (short for Mohammed) Atik Ullah Khan. In his sleep, he heard machine guns and saw himself stuck in a fierce fight between a group of pirates and navy commandos.
He woke up sweating. “I was running and running… trying to go to a safe place, but I could not,” Khan recalls of the recurring nightmare.
Khan, 39, was the chief officer of Bangladesh-flagged merchant vessel Abdullah when it was hijacked on March 12, 2024, roughly 550 nautical miles off the coast of Somalia.
The MV Abdullah was sailing from Mozambique to the United Arab Emirates with 55,000 tons of coal. Around 10 a.m. local time, an unidentified fishing boat appeared on the radar. Soon watchmen spotted six people with automatic rifles heading towards them in a speed boat. Six more followed in another vessel. Ship crew put out a mayday call. “But nobody responded,” Khan said. “Then I called the engine room and told them to cancel all speed limits and throttle to the maximum. But our speed was nothing compared to the pirates’ speedboat,” he added. Minutes later, 12 pirates came onboard, fired rounds, took control of the ship and held its crew hostage.
After almost a decade of hibernation, Somali pirates have resurfaced. Their reemergence follows the Yemen Houthi movement’s campaign to target Red Sea shipping in support of Hamas in its war with Israel. Analysts believe the Red Sea crisis has drawn the attention of counter-piracy naval resources deployed in the region and acted as a distraction, allowing the pirates to stage a comeback.
