NN Online Report:
Any raid by foreign navies on the hijacked Bangladeshi-flagged cargo vessel MV Abdullah is unlikely as Bangladesh hasn’t given consent to such action, said an expert.
The EU Naval Force today released a video and three images on its X (formerly Twitter) account, showing that MV Abdullah was only a few nautical miles away. A helicopter was seen flying over the Bangladeshi-flagged ship.
Earlier on Monday, a Reuters report citing Somali police said international navies were preparing to raid MV Abdullah to free the ship and its crew from pirates.
However, Captain Anam Chowdhury, president of the Bangladesh Merchant Marine Officers’ Association, said raiding a foreign vessel without the consent of the vessel-owning country is not the likely scenario.
“The government did not give consent to international forces to forcefully intervene to end the crisis,” he told the media today.
Contacted, KSRM Group Media Adviser Mizanul said both the Bangladesh government and the ship-owning firm want to resolve the crisis peacefully through negotiation.
“We want our crewmen to come back safe. We don’t support any step that might put the lives of the crew members at risk,” he said.
KSRM is the parent organisation of SR Shipping and owns MV Abdullah.
On March 12, pirates attacked MV Abdullah around 1:30 pm (Bangladesh time), when it was around 500 nautical miles off the Somali coast, sailing from Maputo in Mozambique to Al Hamriyah in the UAE with 58,000 tonnes of coal.
After reaching the Somali coast on March 14, the pirates changed the ship’s location twice and anchored the ship around 4 nautical miles off Somalia’s Gadabjiran coast.
At the peak of their attacks in 2011, Somali pirates cost the global economy an estimated $7 billion, including hundreds of millions of dollars in ransom payments.
