Tuesday November 8, 2016
The Philippine authorities recovering the Rockall on Sunday in the country’s south.
A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for, the old maritime saying goes. A German sailing couple, seized and held for ransom eight years ago by Somali pirates, apparently lived by that rule.
A German yachting website reported Monday that the couple appeared to have been abducted again, this time while cruising a dangerous area of the Philippines, by militants of Abu Sayyaf, an insurgent group known for kidnapping and ransoming foreigners. The woman was said to have been killed.
The couple, Jürgen Kantner, 70, and his partner, Sabine Merz, have been sailing the oceans for many years aboard their 30-footer, the Rockall. They were held for 52 days in Somalia in 2008 before their captors freed them, reportedly after a six-figure ransom had been paid.
The Philippine media on Monday reported that a German couple had been attacked while sailing in an area of the southern Philippines under the control of Abu Sayyaf. The woman was shot and the man abducted, the reports said.
The Philippine Daily Inquirer quoted a spokesman for Abu Sayyaf as saying via telephone that the woman had fired upon them, “Our men shot back and killed her,” he said.
The newspaper said that the spokesman had made a man come to the phone and that he had identified himself as Jürgen Kantner. The account quoted him as saying: “Pirates took our boat and they took us.”
In Berlin, the Foreign Ministry said that it was working with Philippine authorities to clarify the situation. “As always in such cases, I would like to be very tight-lipped,” said the ministry spokesman, Martin Schäfer. He stressed that there was no confirmation of the reported killing or the abduction.
Uwe Janssen, editor in chief of the yachting website, Yacht.de, noted the lack of official confirmation but wrote that a photograph released by the Philippine military authorities “is clear: the attacked vessel indeed belongs to Jürgen Kantner.”
The sailboat in the photo is marked Rockall, the same name that was on the vessel captured by the Somalis eight years ago.
Mr. Janssen said “everything suggests that the two victims” were Mr. Kantner and Ms. Merz.
In May 2009, Agence France-Presse reported that Mr. Kantner had returned to Somalia after the couple’s abduction and release, and quoted him as vowing to get the Rockall seaworthy once more and to set off for Asia.
“Why should I return to Germany, where I have nobody?” he was quoted as saying. “After 32 years on my boat, I have lost all contact with them.” He acknowledged “that it is a little bit like suicide,” and said he prayed he would not get captured a second time.
In a lengthy interview with the German magazine Yacht after the 2008 abduction, Mr. Kantner and Ms. Merz said they had been captured then while sailing close to the coast of Yemen, and that they had no warning of special danger. They dismissed suggestions that they had courted danger, citing cases of vessels robbed in calmer regions such as the Canary Islands or Corsica.