PALAKKAD: After a long, painful wait, Vinodini was relieved to hear the voice of her son, who is held captive in Somalia since March. The ship, in which Mithun was a crew member, was hijacked by the Somali pirates off the Oman coast on March 2, when it was on its way from the Sharjah port to Nigeria. “The ship has run out of food and water and the crew members are starving and exhausted. That’s what he said,” Vinodini told ‘Express’.“He told me there were five Malayalis among the 17 Indian nationals on board, she added.Yesterday, all the five Malayalis - one each from Kollam, Ottapalam and Thiruvananthapuram, and one from Irinjlakuda - called up their family members. “I can remember two names that Mithun had mentioned, one Manesh from Thiruvananthapuram and Stanley Vincent from Irinjalakuda,” she said. “The parents of the five Malayalis are in touch with each other. The ship owners were unable to pay the huge ransom demanded by the pirates,” said Vinodini. “We have filed petitions in various Centre Ministries and also the State Government but there has been no move from their side. We have also approached Union Ministers and MPs, said Rajagopal, Mithun’s uncle.“My husband Chandran is in Dubai. He had also gone to the Indian consulate there seeking their assistance,” she said. Unless Mithun calls and asks us to call back, we can’t get in touch with him.Vinodini said that they came to know about the hijacking of the ship very late. “The original owners who offered Mithun the job had named the ship ‘Royal Lady’. But the Dubai-based owners sold the ship to the Nigerians who changed the name to ‘Royal Grace’. So, we ignored the news. Later, in April, the Mumbai-based Great East India Agency, which sent Mithun to Dubai, telephoned us to tell us about the hijack. Earlier, during the last fortnight, Mithun had telephoned twice to say he was safe. But the third call yesterday was in distress, said Rajagopal. Mithun has completed his BSc (nautical science) from New Delhi and had earlier worked for nine months in a ship. This was his second posting in another ship and it has hardly been a month since he joined the ‘Royal Lady’, when it was hijacked, said Rajagopal.
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