Turkey announced, on Friday, the liberation of 15 sailors who were kidnapped from a Turkish company cargo ship off the coast of Nigeria last month.

Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşolu said that the crew of the "Mozart" were in good health and would return to Turkey from the Nigerian capital Abuja within days.

"We will return our citizens," the official Anatolia News Agency quoted Cavusoglu as saying, stressing that "they are in good health," without providing details of how the crew was released.

In other statements to the Turkish TRT news channel, Cavusoglu indicated that the Ankara ambassador to Abuja contacted the captain of the ship, adding, "We have been in contact with their families (the sailors) from the beginning and have provided them with initial information. We will continue to transport our citizens to the capital. (Abuja) and from there to our country via Turkish Airlines. "

Mozart was on its way from Lagos, the economic capital of Nigeria, to Cape Town, South Africa, when pirates took control of it on the 23rd of last month.

The attackers kidnapped 15 of the ship's 19 crew members, while one of them, a national of Azerbaijan, was killed.

3 of the crew returned with the ship to Gabon and then to Turkey.

Over the phone

Cavusoglu confirmed that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan closely follows and knows the developments related to the sailors, and expressed his thanks to the ship-owning company for its efforts.

The head of the shipping company that operates the ship said - in an interview with Turkish TV - that the crew will return to the country after undergoing medical examinations in Nigeria.

The office said last month that pirate attacks on ships around the world jumped 20% last year due to a record wave of hijackings off West Africa.

Last week, the International Maritime Bureau said that 130 of the 135 sailors kidnapped worldwide in 2020 had been kidnapped in the Gulf of Guinea, a record number in this region.

The Gulf of Guinea, bordering Nigeria and stretching from Senegal to Angola, has in recent years become a new hotbed of global piracy.