A hijacked tanker whose 18 crew members were taken hostage by armed pirates then set adrift on a makeshift raft has been recovered just outside Hong Kong waters after a four-month international investigation.
The Panamanian-registered 3,729-tonne MT Global Mars was located and identified just south of Lamma Island yesterday by an SAR search and rescue aircraft. It was acting on a tip-off from the International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Centre in Paris.
Within hours of Hong Kong's identification being passed to the mainland, police and officers from the Border Defence Bureau boarded the vessel, which had changed its name to the Bulawan and claimed a bogus port of registration. Twenty suspected pirates were arrested.
The ship was anchored off Hong Kong because it had engine trouble, Captain Pottengal Mukundan of the Piracy Reporting Centre said.
Piracy remains a problem in waters across Southeast Asia and recently members of a mainland piracy gang were sentenced to death after seizing a ship and slaughtering its crew in the South China Sea.
The MT Global Mars - which was carrying a cargo of 6,000 tonnes of palm oil - was boarded by a 20-strong gang of masked Burmese and Filipino pirates armed with guns and swords on February 23, soon after it left Malaysia for Haldia in India. Its crew of Korean and Burmese nationals were forced on to a fishing boat and held in the hold at gunpoint for 10 days before being set adrift on a small engine-driven raft with minimal provisions and told to sail west.