The pirates arrived with AK-47s. They took us hostage – then the torture began

Chirag Bahri was working on board a tanker when six men seized it. For almost eight months, he and his colleagues were held captive, an experience that would change his life for ever

It was at noon on 8 May 2010 when the pirates came. Chirag Bahri remembers the exact time and date because it marked the start of the seven months and 20 days he was held hostage by a gang of Somali pirates. Bahri was 28 at the time, and working as second engineer on a chemical tanker, Marida Marguerite. It was his 12th journey through the Gulf of Aden in the Indian Ocean. It had been a good job for a young man from landlocked Uttar Pradesh in India, and Bahri was about to be promoted. “But then, piracy,” he says.

The ship had been 120 miles off the coast of Oman, partway through a run taking benzene – a raw material used in petrochemicals – from Kandla Port in India to Antwerp in Belgium. The piracy problem in the Indian Ocean was well known; Somalis armed with AK-47s were setting out in fast skiffs and taking ships hostage. Yet commercial vessels, including the Marida Marguerite, remained undefended.

Big ships are slow and small skiffs are fast. The Marguerite was doing 13 knots; the pirates could do 25 – and they knew to approach in the shadow cast by the funnel on the water, so they were invisible until the last minute. There was nothing the crew could do to defend the ship anyway. All they had was razor wire and luck.

Bahri was in the engine room when he was told that skiffs were approaching. Within 15 minutes they were under attack. Bahri now had a job to do: according to what are called best management practices, ships can deter pirates by zigzagging, so he started pushing the engines to maximum power. But the pirates shot two rocket-propelled grenades at the ship, raised their ladders and scaled the razor wire. They headed for the bridge, the control centre of the ship. The crew had removed ladders to prevent this, but the pirates climbed up pipes. Within minutes, six pirates, hyped up on adrenaline and probably khat – a narcotic plant that is chewed – now held the bridge. The whole crew was summoned: 22 men, comprising 19 Indians, two Bangladeshis and a Ukrainian. Soon after, a helicopter, perhaps answering the captain’s distress calls, flew overhead but it was too late. The pirates just fired into the air. They told the captain to head for Somalia, and he did.

When Bahri arrived at the bridge, the pirates, carrying AK-47s, shouted at him to sit down. “I was terrified. I thought, my God, this is the end.” The crew were sitting on the floor. Several were crying; others were comforting their crewmates, saying, “No, they won’t kill us. This is business.”

And there they stayed. “People were trying to keep their spirits up in the initial days,” says Bahri. “We thought that ours is a good company – they will pay the pirates and we will be out very soon. We were very positive.”

About two days later, they reached the coast off Garacad in northern Somalia. The six pirates left but 40 others came aboard, including a man that spoke better English, who began negotiations with the shipping company for a ransom. “He didn’t get any fruitful result. Whenever the company came up with something, he would ask for more. They started off wanting $15m.”

For 20 days, they were all kept on the bridge, sitting and lying on the hard deck. The engines had to be maintained, so the engineering crew did 12-hour watches in pairs. A guard would escort them to the engine room. “He always suspected that there are so many satellite phone connections on board,” says Bahri. “They thought every intercom phone was a satellite phone.” The watches were a relief, though, giving Bahri something else to do other than sit terrified at the pirates’ feet.

The pirates were all ages, young boys to older men. They had one thing in common. “They were totally insane. Brutal always. Always abusing us and each other. They would fight over a piece of mutton.” At first, the crew ate from the supplies they had on board. When those ran out, the pirates brought rice and dal, and they slaughtered goats on the deck. Bahri paid close attention and began to understand the pirates’ behaviour; the evenings, after they had had their khat, was the most dangerous time. “The mood changes. The eyes get red.”

After 20 days, the captain got permission for the crew to move to four cabins. For four months life went on. Very occasionally – “four times in eight months” – Bahri was allowed to phone home. He told the pirates his family didn’t speak English, although they did. So he spoke in Hindi. “It was terrible. My mother couldn’t speak to me; she was simply crying for two minutes. Government officials told my wife only: ‘One day he will come back.’”

The pirates doled out slaps here and there, but, three months in, “at the end of August, they started the physical torture.” Bahri blames frustration that the negotiations weren’t going well.

On 9 September the worst happened. “I will remember that date all my life. It was like the end of my life.” He was in the engine room at midnight when some pirates arrived and decided he was hiding a satellite phone. “I said, no, they are intercoms, but they said it was a satellite connection and I was using them with passwords to call the navy and my family.

“We were taken up on to the deck at about 6 o’clock in the morning and were asked to lie down on our stomachs. Three pirates came and one took my legs and stretched them, and the other pirate pulled my hands so just my tummy was touching the deck.” He was hog-tied. “It was very, very difficult. They tied a nylon rope around my hands and legs. You cannot move even a few millimetres. Even the genitals were tied up with cable ties. They were such torturous people. They used to have fun with that. Lots of the crew had their genitals tied up.” He was in that position, in full sun, for four hours.

“When they released me, for five minutes I was still in that position – I couldn’t bring my hands or legs down. Slowly I tried standing up but I was not able to. I was on my knees. My legs and hands were shaking. My left hand was half-paralysed for about a month.”

The pirates’ obsession with hidden satellite connections continued and Bahri stopped sleeping from terror of what they might do next. As the captivity continued, Bahri tried to learn some Somali (Hindi and Urdu contain some Somali words). One pirate became friendlier, which helped. But the beatings continued with sticks or fists.

By October, the negotiations were back on track. A $5m ransom was agreed, and on 27 December the money was airdropped into the sea. The pirates fetched it with skiffs, and the money was divided up on board. Other pirates arrived from shore to get paid. “They had logbooks and did the accounts,” says Bahri. This was a dangerous time so the crew stayed away from them. After seven hours, the pirates left with bagfuls of money. Bahri got busy preparing the engines for sailing. “I didn’t want to use tugs. I wanted to take the ship on our power.” It was a matter of pride; proof that the pirates had not taken everything from him.

Escape was slow. The sea journey back to Salalah in Oman took about a week, says Bahri, “as we were not able to use speed due to excessive fouling of the hull after the ship was at anchor for almost eight months.” From there he flew to Delhi. “At the airport, my brother-in-law told me my mother had died.” He had thought something was “fishy” when, en route back to Oman, his family told him that his mother was away on a pilgrimage. In fact she had died from the stress, they thought. When he should have been relieved to be home, he felt profoundly guilty. “I was extremely broken, shocked. And the first thing that came to my mind was that I should not have come back. I would be happy staying in captivity, not knowing that my mother is no more. I thought: this is all because of me.”

For weeks, he was numb. In a further blow, his wife had left him during his captivity and he has never found out why. The physical after-effects were also hard. His back and his head went into spasm; he was unable to sit still for long. He had tests that showed his sperm count was reduced because of the genital trauma. He had sleepless nights and bad dreams when he did sleep. “All those thoughts: ‘What am I going to do, what will happen to me in the future?’”

On top of all this, “there was so much constant feedback coming in from people: ‘Oh, your life is ruined.’ ‘What are you going to do?’ I decided to meet only with positive people and not those who are just there to make fun of my situation.”

It may seem preposterous that anyone could make light of his ordeal, but Bahri says that even some friends who worked in shipping would joke that he hadn’t had to do any work for eight months, and was being fed after all. There was, he says, a “gap of awareness. People had no idea what the pirates do ... They had no idea what a piracy situation looks like.”

Ironically, these negative comments helped him turn a corner. Thanks to them, he realised that no one was talking about what it was like to be in pirate captivity. His friends and neighbours hadn’t known any better because no one understood the brutal reality. So he did two things: he began contacting families whose relatives were being held hostage, and he began to tell his story publicly. He was alone in this – most of his fellow captives had gone back to sea. “A lot of them didn’t have any other livelihood. What are they going to do?”

Bahri made contact with the International Transport Workers’ Federation, which represents seafarers, where a well-respected ITF official called Roy Paul encouraged him to speak out about his experience. Meanwhile, he completed his senior engineer’s exams and later in 2011 went back to sea. Not the Gulf of Aden though: his family wouldn’t have been able to bear that. He found a job on an Indian tanker whose route hugged the Indian coast. He did two months, then was offered a job by Paul with the Maritime Piracy Humanitarian Response Programme (MPHRP), which supports hostages and their families. “I said: ‘I don’t know. What do you mean by humanitarian support? I’ve never heard of this term. I’m not qualified. I’m an engineer; I’m a technical person.’ He told me that I was already doing it.”

Today Bahri is still working in this field. In 2012, ships started using armed guards, reducing the threat from the pirates, and the MPHRP amalgamated with the International Seafarers’ Welfare and Assistance Network. But the pirates are still around, and families of captives are often left floundering. “There were cases where families had issues with their gas supply, because the connection was in the husband’s name. Or the account was seized because it was in the seafarer’s name. And the family could not do much because the account had been dormant for one or two years [while the seafarer was held hostage]. On the humanitarian side, we have found families struggling because they have no information.”

Recently, Bahri has been working with the families of 11 of the 17 crew members of the oil tanker Honour 25, now in its fifth month of captivity at the hands of Somali pirates. He is also working with seafarers stuck because of the war in Iran. Using his own experience to help others has been healing for him, he says. “It has helped me a lot. Because when I meet seafarers and their family members, I help bring smiles to their faces. I know at least something good has happened. If I didn’t do this work, I would be struggling. I would still be sailing, still blaming myself, and I wouldn’t have understood that it isn’t good to blame yourself. It was the situation that was wrong.”

He has remarried, happily, and now has two young children. Given what he’s been through, how would he feel if either of them wanted to work at sea? “It’s still a long way to go,” he says. “But I keep sharing my stories with my son about shipping. If he wanted to [work at sea], I would definitely like that.”