Weeks of hostage negotiations by an émigré with no experience freed a Nigerian tug's crew
Omar Jamal, a Somali community organiser, says his temper finally snapped towards the end of an interminable series of negotiations in the longest running of the spate of ship hijackings in and around the Gulf of Aden.
After many weeks of phone calls aimed at cajoling a group of kidnappers into releasing the Nigerian tug Yenagoa Ocean and its 10 sailors, he issued a stark ultimatum. "I said: 'Give me the crew of the ship alive or give me the dead bodies,' " he recalls. "That seemed to work."
Mr Jamal, a resident in the US for nine years, is one of the accidental heroes of an against-the-odds triumph in the piracy crisis. Operating from the unlikely setting of Minnesota's state capital, St Paul, he worked for months with relatives of the crew to free a vessel hijacked for 10 months by bandits from one of the world's most lawless states.
The result was a striking cut-price deal to free a largely forgotten group of men whose abandonment contrasted with the diplomatic pressure, military intervention and millions of dollars in ransoms and negotiating fees expended to liberate other kidnapped ships.
The men's troubles began in August, when pirates intercepted the Yenagoa Ocean en route from Dubai to the southern Nigerian base of ESL Integrated Services, its new owner. The kidnappers demanded a $1m ransom from the company.
ESL says it tried and failed to do a deal with the pirates. It paid them only $80,000 via an international wire transfer towards the end of last year, to cover the ship's fuel needs and the crew's subsistence.
Terence Dafiaghor, ESL's administration manager, said there was "no way" his small business could have afforded to pay $1m. The crew's relatives also sought help from the Nigerian government but felt they were getting nowhere.
It was a far cry from efforts taken to rescue crews in other pirate kidnappings, in which shipowners have hired specialist hostage negotiators and paid ransoms of $1m to $2m. Western forces have even been deployed in some cases, most strikingly in April's rescue by US navy commandoes of Captain Richard Phillips.
Denied these options, the Yenagoa Ocean crew's relatives set the Nigerian diaspora bush telegraphs humming instead. One of those it mobilised was Jeffrey Egbide, brother of the ship's captain, who is an estate agent in St Paul.
It was Mr Egbide who made the crucial contact with Mr Jamal, a business consultant and director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center, a non-profit organisation in St Paul. Mr Jamal responded by contacting Minnesota-based elders from the same sub-clan as the pirates, only to find them reluctant to get involved for fear of being associated with the kidnapping and branded terrorists.
So Mr Jamal took on the responsibility of the kidnap negotiations himself. Mr Egbide says he ran up a bill of $6,072 in two months for phone calls that often lasted until the small hours, with the kidnappers taking breaks to pray.
Inexperienced in hostage negociations
Mr Jamal, who had no experience of hostage negotiations, appealed to the pirates to be merciful, suggesting the crew should be handed over to people he knew in the Somali port of Bosaso. Over time, as frustration set in, he became less submissive and less careful of the captors' feelings. He says: "As negotiations went on I started getting upset and hanging up the phone - and they rang right back."
Mr Egbide says he made a down-payment of $39,000 in April, part-financed by an $8,000 loan taken out against his Hyundai car.
Mr Egbide followed this up with a payment of $4,000, which turned out to be decisive. The kidnappers - who, Mr Jamal says, were becoming ever more distracted by internal disputes over the money - allowed the ship to sail for Yemen and freedom.
Mr Jamal says the pirates have since called threatening to kill him if he does not send more cash. It is one of many reasons he is hoping his maiden taste of hostage negotiation also proves his swansong.
Source: ftd.de
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