T

he Indonesian Foreign Ministry has sent a team to Hanoi to meet with eight hijackers alleged to be Indonesian nationals, an official has said.

'€œThe team was supposed to meet [the hijackers] today but failed,'€ the ministry'€™s director for legal aid and the protection of Indonesian nationals overseas, Lalu Muhammad Iqbal, told The Jakarta Post on Sunday.

The ministry deployed an identification team after media quoted Malaysian navy chief Adm. Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Jaafar as saying that the eight hijackers spoke with Indonesian accents.

Aziz said last week that the Malaysian navy had surveilled and photographed the oil tanker in Cambodian waters and found that the eight pirates on board spoke with Indonesian accents.

'€œAt least eight perpetrators are on board. They are armed with pistols and parang [straight-edged knives]. They speak with [an] Indonesian accent,'€ Aziz wrote on his Twitter account on Thursday.

The eight pirates appear to have taken the vessel to Tho Chu island off southwest Vietnam. Agence France-Presse reported on Saturday that Vietnam authorities had questioned eight people suspected of having hijacked the Orkim Harmony tanker.

When Vietnamese marine police questioned the eight, who had reached the island on a lifeboat, they claimed to have been shipwrecked following an accident, AFP reported.

The Malaysian authorities have begun negotiations with the Vietnamese police to get the eight suspected hijackers extradited to Malaysia after the latter confirmed that the eight suspects had admitted hijacking the Malaysian vessel.

Meanwhile, Iqbal said the ministry and the National Police were coordinating with Malaysian police on the matter.

Orkim Harmony, a Malaysian-flagged tanker, was reported missing on June 12 after leaving Melaka on Malaysia'€™s west coast for Kuantan on the east coast. The vessel lost contact after traveling 30 miles into the South China Sea.

The tanker was carrying 6,000 tons of RON95 fuel, worth an estimated US$5.6 million, belonging to Malaysian state gas and oil company Petronas.

The tanker was manned by a crew of 22, consisting of 16 Malaysian nationals, five Indonesians and one Myanmar citizen. All 22 were safe but the tanker'€™s cook, an Indonesian, was shot in the thigh.

The wounded Indonesian crewmember was being treated in a Malaysian hospital, while the other four Indonesians had arrived at Kuantan on Saturday, Iqbal said on Sunday.

The Foreign Ministry said it had also summoned the director of PT Yudian Unggul Indonesia, a manpower agency that placed the five Indonesian crewmembers. The agency confirmed that another tanker had been hijacked at the same location on June 4. The crew was unharmed in the earlier incident, the hijackers simply stealing the tanker'€™s load.

The ministry also confirmed that the agency had agreed to keep paying the wages of the five crewmembers until they had arrived safely in Indonesia. (saf)