Iranian Diplomacy- A new online campaign has once again turned heads to Iranian sailors who were abducted aboard a fishing boat by Somali pirates some two years ago. The campaign gathering momentum on Twitter and Facebook is collecting signatures for a letter addressed to Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, urging him and the country’s diplomatic apparatus to do its utmost for the sailors’ freedom.

It was on March 26, 2015 that a group of Somali pirates captured the fishing fleet, which had set out into the Gulf of Oman waters in February. According to Khabar Online, Iranian sailors on board knew the journey could risk encounters with pirates but felt confident that navy and IRGC flotilla operations had impeded the pirates’ defiance.

“It is almost 580 days that a group of Iranian sailors, who are Baloch citizens, have been kidnapped and taken to Somalia by pirates. From the 21 sailors abducted, four have been released, one has escaped, two have been killed, and the rest are captives of the pirates under inhuman conditions. Unfortunately, this has been kept a secret from public opinions and there is no sign of a measure undertaken by the foreign ministry,” part of the Free Iranian Sailors campaign letter reads.

Right in the midst of the campaign’s heat, the Reformist daily Shargh reported on Sunday that another Iranian fishing launch has fallen prey to Somali pirates. Bijan Bakhtiar, Governor of Konarak County in Baluchistan Province of Iran, who broke the news, declined to reveal further details.

However, figures published on the number of hostages are quite different with what Etemad daily reports. Eight anglers have been killed under torture, reports Etemad. “Four have escaped with the help of the Somali government and one has run on his own.” The remaining eight have been divided into two four-man groups and a certain amount of ransom has been demanded for each.

Parvin, the wife of Captain Jamaleddin Dehvari, 41, has told Etemad daily that the pirates, having hired a Persian-speaking interpreter, only want dollars. According to the daily, the pirates have asked $150000 for the group that includes the Captain and his relatives and $30000 for the second group.

However, an unidentified relative of the fishermen, whose three of four cousins on board have starved to death, tells Etemad that paying the ransom does not help release the hostages. “Two months ago, I myself deposited 80 million tomans (more than $20000) into the Somalis account but they did not free our fishermen. They keep telling us we should find a Pakistani around ourselves who knows the language,” he said.

The inconsistency in the number of hostages, as Bakhtiar tells Shargh, is because Iranian launches usually leave docks with almost 15 men on board but when they get further from the coast they embark or disembark passengers, among them Pakistani raftsmen.

Local officials in Iran have expressed their discontent over the media attention given to the hostages recently. Ali-Asghar Mojahedi, Iran Fisheries Organization deputy for fishing and ports, sheds doubt on the likelihood of such campaigns to bear results, arguing that they could be detrimental too. “We should see how much they help. About seven months ago, we had reached a solution but when news reached media the game changed and we failed,” he told Shargh. The solution reached was to pay the ransom.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman have repeatedly stressed that Tehran is pursuing the sailors’ release but publicizing the issue could threaten the lives of the victims and further complicate the issue. “Even the United States and Western countries pursue such issues secretively and without public clamor in order to pay less in similar situations,” Shargh quoted Bahram Qassemi as saying on the sidelines of the latest edition of Tehran Press Exhibition.

On Friday, Deputy Foreign Minister for Consulate Affairs Hassan Ghashghavi told ISNA that what really complicated the sailors’ freedom is the cessation of ties between Iran and Somalia, after a group of hardline vigilantes raided the Saudi embassy in Tehran over the execution of prominent Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. Iran does not even have an interest section in Somalia at the moment.