For more than four years, Arnel Balbero was held hostage by Somali pirates, surviving in the African bush on small animals he caught like birds and rats. He’s now a free man once again, but the sailor’s journey back to normalcy has only just begun.
Balbero, 32, arrived in Nairobi, Kenya, on Monday, three days after he and the 25 remaining members of the Taiwan-owned FV Naham 3 were freed after a reported $1.5 million ransom was paid. Three other crew members either died during the March 2012 hijacking or from illnesses during captivity. Balbero, for his part, said he simply did what he needed to do to keep on living.
“You need to eat everything,” he told CNN. “You need to eat to survive.”
Balbero, who was 28 when pirates attacked his vessel south of Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, said the pirates who took them to the north-central Mudug region of Somalia would often beat the sailors and deprive them of food and water.
‘They had the mentality of animals. When you got sick and you asked for medical treatment, they said it’s better to die.’
“They had the mentality of animals,” Balbero told CNN. “When you got sick and you asked for medical treatment, they said it’s better to die. What can you say about that? Of course that is an animal mind to let people die.”
Balbero said he joined the crew of the fishing vessel on the same day as the other sailors who later died in captivity from an unknown disease that caused their legs and faces to swell.
“We worked in the ship the same year and were on the same three-year contract,” he told CNN. “When we were told we were going home, I remembered these two crew members and the captain, and I said, ‘We’re sorry.’”
The next stop for Balbero, according to CNN, will be a return to his native Philippines, where he hopes to be reunited with his sister and other relatives.
A pirate representative, Bile Hussein, told the Associated Press that $1.5 million was paid in ransom for the release of the sailors, who hailed from Vietnam, Taiwan, Cambodia, Indonesia, China and the Philippines. They did not speak to reporters upon arriving Tuesday at an airport in Vietnam.
The father of another kidnapped sailor said he never heard from his son after getting phone calls from him during his first year of captivity.
“(We were) worried, but did not know what to do,” Linh told the Associated Press while waiting for his son, Phan Xuan Linh. “They were pirates, they were lawless and we just prayed for him and did not know who to call for help, because the pirates are similar to terrorists. We had faint hope that my son would return home. Today we are very happy.”