'They took away everything'

NEW DELHI: The two months ordeal at the hands of Somalian pirates aboard MT Stolt Valor does not seem to have ruffled its Captain ��� looking relaxed, if somewhat tired, Captain Prabhat Kumar Goyal addressed a press conference at Hotel Thirty Three on Siri Fort road on Monday.
His wife Seema and their three children flanked him as he spoke about the 'skeletal' looking pirates, who hijacked the Japanese-owned ship on September 15, armed with light machine guns."Twelve of them came on board. They had fired at us with missiles that fell 10-12 metres short of the vessel."
In a steady voice he recalled : "They couldn't speak English ��� it was in sign language that I pointed out cliffs on a chart and they indicated where they wanted to go."
Speaking of the urgent need for the Indian Navy to sanitize the area, he said effective patrolling was the only way the Gulf of Aden could be rid of piracy. "The world doesn't know but there are vessels abandoned by their owners," he said, adding that vessels with Nigerian crew were being used as "mother vessels" to hijack others.
The captain elaborated upon what it was like to live at gunpoint for two months. "We let go anchor at Eyl on the 17th ��� it was a place of their choice. A negotiator came on board. He spoke broken English and the first thing he said was 'I love all religion'. Perhaps that was to reassure us that they weren't going to kill us."
Goyal recalled how the pirates pilfered the cabins: "They took everything ��� watches, clothes, even underwear." The pirates, who were mostly local fishermen, munched on a kind of Kenyan grass with spinach-like leaves that they sometimes boiled in water. "It gave them a high ��� made their eyes unnaturally bright," the captain recalled.
He recounted how he was careful to segregate the supplies of the crew and the pirates. "My people were falling sick ��� flu and dysentery were spreading and one of the crew members vomited blood. They (the pirates) were using our supplies. We separated their stuff ��� kept basic utensils, foodstuff and bed linen on the port (left) side of the ship, which is where they were."
Nihal Singh, a crew member who also returned home to Faridabad on Monday, recalled how they were accompanied at gunpoint even to the toilets. But there were also small mercies ��� permission to fish for an hour on certain days.