Four Indonesian crew of the MT Honour 25 land in Jakarta after a Puntland rescue

Four Indonesian seafarers from the hijacked tanker MT Honour 25 arrived at Soekarno-Hatta airport in Tangerang on Tuesday, 6 October 2026, and were handed to their families. They had been held off Somalia for nearly six months. Puntland's maritime police freed the ship on 29 September in an armed operation, after the pirates killed five other crew members.

The four who landed are Captain Ashari Samadikun, 34, from Gowa in South Sulawesi; Wahudinanto, 48, from Pemalang in Central Java; Adi Faizal, 27, from Bulukumba in South Sulawesi; and Fiki Mutakin, 25, from Bogor in West Java. Indonesia's ambassador to Kenya and Somalia, Witjaksono Adji, spoke at the handover. He said Jakarta had not agreed to any demand from the hijackers. "If we were to grant the hijackers' demands during negotiations, it would violate international regulations," he said, in remarks carried by Antara. He said Indonesia had favoured diplomacy and had not held direct official talks with the men holding the crew. His team had looked at maritime cooperation with Puntland and had worked through local networks and non-governmental groups. The release, he said, came from the Puntland operation, not from a paid settlement.

Puntland's account of that operation, given on 29 September and reported by Reuters, is harder. The Palau-flagged petroleum-products tanker had 17 crew when pirates seized it in April, during a return of Somali piracy that shipping analysts have tied in part to the Iran war and to higher oil prices. Puntland's information ministry said the pirates killed five crew before the rescue began: three from Pakistan, one from Myanmar and one from India. Four others, three Pakistanis and one Indian, were hurt. The ministry said 16 pirates were captured. Puntland also said it had freed a second tanker the same day, MT Eureka, hijacked in May, after the attackers fled ashore as police approached, and that a week earlier its force had freed the US-sanctioned tanker Sibu 1, taken in August.

The five deaths are the first killings of crew by Somali pirates in more than a decade, on the Reuters reading of the Puntland statement. That is the break with the pattern of the 2010s, when hijacks were built around ransom and crews were usually kept alive as the asset. A killing before the assault started changes the calculation for the next master who is boarded off Puntland. It also explains why Adji spent his airport remarks on the refusal to pay. A government that pays after a killing invites the next demand. A government that will not talk officially leaves the rescue to the local force, which is what happened on 29 September.

The four names at Soekarno-Hatta are the Indonesian share of a 17-person crew. The dead include an Indian and three Pakistanis. The injured include an Indian and three Pakistanis. Families in Karachi, Yangon and an Indian port town are not at the Jakarta handover. The public record of their names has not been released in the same way. Until it is, the verified dead are five, by nationality, and the verified living arrivals are the four Indonesians Adji named.

What the week settles is a narrow operational point. Puntland's maritime police can still take a tanker back, and can do it more than once in a fortnight, as Eureka and Sibu 1 show. They cannot do it before the crew is used as a message. Honour 25 is the case that carries both facts: a rescue on 29 September, a homecoming on 6 October, and five graves that predate the assault.