Last week Filipino sailor Antonio Libref was in forest in the Horn of Africa marking his 1,672nd day in captivity at the hands of Somali pirates. Kept alongside 25 other Asians, all crew of the Omani-flagged Naham 3 fishing vessel, thin and haggard hostages were treated “like animals” forced “to eat rats just to survive”.



On Monday, the 32-year-old was having his first proper meal as a newly free man in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. Two days earlier, he and fellow sailors from Vietnam, Taiwan, Cambodia, Indonesia and China, captured in March 2012 south of the Seychelles, had been released in exchange for a ransom.



Bile Hussein, the pirates’ representative, claimed in comments reported by one news agency that the value of that ransom was $1.5m (£1.2m), a figure that could not be independently confirmed.

The men’s handover represented “the end of captivity for the last remaining seafarers taken hostage during the height of Somali piracy”, said the NGO Oceans Beyond Piracy (OBP). The Taiwan-owned Naham 3 crew were the second-longest held hostages by Somali pirates. Only one other group, who were released in 2015 after five years, were held longer.



“We were treated like animals, so it feels good to be human again,” Libref told the Guardian via phone as he waited to be repatriated to the Philippines, where he hopes to join his family later this week. He said he was thrilled to be free.



“I’m full of happiness,” he said. “It was a surprise; we didn’t expect to be released ... If you believe in God, hope is always there – we were in the hands of pirates yet there was hope, there was a miracle and we’re back in normality.”

The happiness of those who were freed, however, may be tinged with the grief felt for those who did not make it. The Naham 3 crew had originally numbered 29, but the captain was killed on the day the ship was hijacked and two others “succumbed to illness during their captivity”, according to OBP.

Details of how the sailors were released – and who paid a ransom – have been kept under wraps. What is known is that the men’s torment came to an end when they were flown to Nairobi on Sunday evening. Images taken at the Jomo Kenyatta international airport show the former hostages, tears in their eyes, hugging each other in disbelief.

John Steed, a retired British colonel who helped to negotiate the release as coordinator of the Hostage Support Partners (HSP), was on the plane to bring the men to Kenya.



“We flew into Somalia yesterday to the city of Galkayo, which is one of these divided cities with a lot of fighting,” he said. “We picked them up in an airstrip outside the city, and they were handed to us by a local community, elders and regional administration, and flew them back here to Nairobi, where they are having medical care.”



Steed said the hostages were beginning to open up, talking about “how cruel the pirates were and how they beat them up and tortured them”. Some of their account is harrowing. The hostages have said that two of the sailors who subsequently died were then kept inside the freezer.



After being captured, Libref and his fellow hostages were kept on board Naham 3 for a year and a half before being taken to land. The OBP said trawler was initially tethered to another hijacked vessel, the MV Albedo, but that both had subsequently sunk, on separate occasions.



“When the MV Albedo began to sink, with its crew onboard, the crew of the Naham 3 courageously assisted in their rescue by jumping into the ocean to save the drowning seafarers. Over a year after its capture, the Naham 3 sank and the crew was brought ashore, where they were subject to much greater risks,” according to OBP.



Out in the forest, Libref said the hostages became so hungry they ate rats. “We suffered a lot, we only ate rice, beans, flour, wheat, so we were forced to catch rats; we had to survive,” he said. They made nets out of rope and tree trunks to capture rats and birds, using rice as bait.



Arnel Balbero, another of the captives, told the BBC his time as a hostage had left him feeling like the “walking dead”.

Many people went to greet the hostages as they arrived in Nairobi, but the presence of one person took all 26 of them by surprise. Michael Scott Moore is a

US journalist who had spent five months with them on Naham 3. Moore, who was captured while researching a book on piracy in Somalia, was released in 2014.



He said he had got along well with all the former hostages, especially the five Filipinos, who spoke English. He said their tales of captivity were an indication of how badly they were treated.



“I was totally hungry. I lost a lot of weight but I wasn’t so desperate that I felt that I needed to catch birds,” he said. “Two of them died of disease; what they always do is throw drugs at the person who is sick. When I came down with something actually serious, they tested my blood, and they found it was malaria and they brought me the proper medication. The fact that they didn’t do that with these guys tells you that on an individual level, the circumstances were worse for each one of them.”



Piracy off Somalia’s coast was once a serious threat to the global shipping industry, but the number of attacks has declined sharply in recent years since vessels began carrying armed guards and EU naval forces increased patrols. No commercial ship has been successfully attacked for about four years, but observers warn the threat remains.

The OBP said on Saturday: “Whilst there has not been a successful attack on a commercial vessel since 2012, there have been a number of attacks on fishing vessels and there remain a number of hostages still held in Somalia.” Among those still far from freedom are 10 Iranians and three Kenyans. In 2015, at least 306 seafarers were attacked in the region.

Libref said he did not have any plans for the future yet. “Now, to be free is enough,” he said. “But my message is to the pirates: what they are doing is very bad. You capture people; you ask for money. What is the value of money?”

