Seafarer who escaped from pirates in Nigeria recounts ordeal

Seafarer who escaped from pirates in Nigeria recounts ordeal
Ch Sushil Rao | Nov 30, 2020 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/hyderabad/seafarer-who-escaped-...

Hyderabad: Even a week after returning from Nigeria, Jarjana Shankar Rao is yet to recover from the harrowing experience he had gone through with pirates and later at the jail.

The seafarer’s ship ‘MT Apecus’ was attacked by the pirates in Nigerian waters on April 19, 2019. Interestingly, Shankar Rao was not captured by the pirates as he followed what Tom Hanks told his crew in the ‘Captain Phillips’, the Hollywood film released in 2013. Rao hid himself in the engine room and the pirates took five Indian seafarers captive.

Interestingly, Rao told his fellow seafarer and friend Avinash that he had a bad dream in which his ship was attacked by the pirates. “I had a dream just the previous night that our ship would be attacked by pirates. I told this to my Avinash in the morning. The dream came true and it was a nightmarish experience for me,” Rao told TOI from his home in Vizianagaram. The events that played out on that day on April 19, 2019 are still fresh in his memory. “But I would like to erase those memories and not allow any fear to creep in again,” he said.

Though he escaped from the pirates, his joy was shortlived as he along with the rest of the crew — from Nigeria and Ghana — was arrested by Nigerian authorities as their ship entered the Bonny anchorage without permission. After languishing in the Nigerian jail for over a year, Rao was back home on November 22, thanks to the intervention of the Indian High Commission. It turned out be an emotional reunion with his relatives and fiancée Divya in Vizianagaram. His parents passed away a few years back. His fellow seafarers, who were taken captive by the pirates, were released on June 27, 2019.

Recollecting the incidents of that fateful day, Rao said that he seldom realised that engine room was not a safe place. The first thing the pirates do is that they go to the engine room to switch off the engines. When the armed pirates boarded the deck of MT Apecus, instinctively Shankar rushed into the engine room.
What saved him was that the chief engineer of the ship had also come into the engine room and switched off the engine. The pirates left the room as the engines were shut.