Five seafarers are dead after Somali pirates executed crew members aboard the hijacked product tanker Honour 25 before Puntland security forces recaptured the vessel — the first confirmed crew deaths at the hands of Somali pirates in more than a decade.

Puntland's information ministry identified the victims as three Pakistanis, one Indian national and one Myanmar national. All were killed before forces boarded the Palau-flagged tanker. Four additional crew — three Pakistanis and one Indian — sustained injuries during the operation, and Puntland forces captured 16 suspected pirates.

The Honour 8,500-barrel story began on April 21, when pirates seized the vessel roughly 30 nautical miles off the Puntland coast. The tanker carried 17 crew and around 18,500 barrels of oil. Splash reported at the time that the hijacking formed part of four attacks in four days, a burst of activity that prompted regional security authorities to raise the Somali coast threat level.

Conditions aboard the deteriorated sharply over the following months. By July, food supplies had been reduced largely to rice, drinking water was unsafe, and several crewmembers suffered health problems. Splash also documented gunfire between rival pirate groups around the vessel as factions fought over the hijack and its potential ransom.

Two more vessels recovered

The Honour 25 was not the only recovery this week. Puntland forces also freed the hijacked tanker Eureka on Tuesday after its captors fled ashore. Together with last week's rescue of the US-sanctioned Sibu 1, five of the six vessels held by Somali pirates in late August have now been released.

For shipowners and operators trading through the Gulf of Aden and along the Somali Basin, the message is stark: the era when Somali piracy could be treated as a contained historical risk is over. The deaths aboard the Honour 25 mark a departure from the hijack-for-ransom model that dominated the 2008-2012 peak, when pirates generally kept crews alive as bargaining chips. A shift toward violence raises the stakes for war risk underwriters, private maritime security contractors and the navies that scaled back patrols after the threat subsided a decade ago.

Charterers routing product tankers near the Somali coast now face hard decisions on armed guards, convoy arrangements and rerouting — costs that bite hardest on short-haul regional trades where margins are thin.

Hijackings accelerating

The revival of Somali piracy has accelerated through 2026. Splash counted eight successful hijackings since April by mid-September. Pirate groups have increasingly used captured fishing vessels and dhows as motherships, extending operations far offshore and widening the geographic footprint that shipowners must factor into voyage planning.

The mothership tactic matters commercially. It pushes the risk zone well beyond the coastal strip that legacy security corridors were designed to cover, meaning vessels on routes once considered clear of the high-risk area — including traffic passing well off East Africa — now sit within reach of pirate action groups.

With five of six recently held vessels now recovered, Puntland's forces have demonstrated an operational capacity to reclaim hijacked ships. But the deaths aboard the Honour 25 show that rescue comes at a human cost, and that crews — not just hulls and cargo — are bearing the risk of a piracy resurgence that shows no sign of slowing.