For weeks, an unpleasant dream haunted Md (short for Mohammed) Atik Ullah Khan. In his sleep, he heard machine guns and saw himself stuck in a fierce fight between a group of pirates and navy commandos. He woke up sweating.
“I was running and running… trying to go to a safe place, but I could not,” Khan recalls of the recurring nightmare.
Khan, 39, was the chief officer of Bangladesh-flagged merchant vessel Abdullah when it was hijacked on March 12, 2024, roughly 550 nautical miles off the coast of Somalia.
The MV Abdullah was sailing from Mozambique to the United Arab Emirates with 55,000 tons of coal. Around 10 a.m. local…
