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| Home at last! Suez sailors meet fam |
| Home at last! Suez sailors meet families
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| INDIA
, 24-June-2011
6:35:30 AM |
| Anxious parents, wives and children holding posters that said "Thank You, Burney Uncle" waited for hours at the Delhi Airport this morning. This wait, so different than the agonising 10 months while their men were hostages for Somali pirates.
A few minutes before 11, the six Indian sailors from the ill-fated Suez emerged.
"We were beaten when they were drunk and they would use anything they could get their hands on to beat us. We were sure they would kill us. There were moments when I wished they would just kill us so that we escape the torture," said N K Sharma, one of the rescued sailors. (Watch: Often we had no food, water, say sailors)
They all made it a point to thank Pakistan for securing their freedom. "It was the Pakistani ship the Babar that responded to us," they said, adding that the Indian navy 's Godavari warship, sent to escort the Suez after a Pakistani warship got their first, had ignored their SOS-es. (Watch: "Never step foot on a ship again") The Babar took the Suez crew to Oman; the Pakistani warship Zulfiqar took them from Oman to Karachi yesterday; and alst night, the Indan government flew them from Pakistan to Dubai, from where they caught a flight to Delhi this morning.
External Affairs Minister SM Krishna said that India "appreciates the role of Pakistan in bringing the sailors home." Rejecting criticism from the Indians on the Suez, and the media, the minister also said that "India did all it needed to bring them home... without the Government of India's efforts, this would not have happened."
The Suez was attacked by pirates 10 months ago. The 22 crew members included four Pakistanis. Ansar Burney, the Pakistani human rights activist, has devoted his time to a painstaking negotiation for their release. With the ship's Egyptian owners, he talked the pirates down from a 20 million dollar ransom to 2.1 million dollars. Some of the ransom was paid by the Suez owners; the balance was raised by Mr Burney through donations in
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