The five Bulgarian crew members of the St. James Park tanker landed in the city of Varna Friday after spending more than four months in the hands of the Somali pirates.

The five men – Svetlozar Tenev, Emil Dyankov, Nikolay Kolev, Ivaylo Ruse, and Stefan Angelov – were met by their relatives and friends at the Varna Airport. They were also welcomed by Bulgaria’s Transport Minister Alexander Tsvetkov and the Mayor of Varna, Kiril Yordanov.

“The Somali pirates are very good manipulators,” declared the the Deputy Captain of the St. James Park, Ivaylo Rusev, during the news conference that the five men gave upon their arrival.

“Not more than 15% of the what reaches the international public about them is true. There were moments that I did not know if I was telling my relatives the truth on the phone,” the sailor explained.

He added that the Somali pirates are very well-trained, and that they have recently started to use a new tactic – camouflaging their ships to make them look like international naval vessels.

“Part of their tactics is to keep the captain and the crew separately, and to manipulate both sides,” Rusev explained revealing that during their time in captivity, the sailors could hear gun shots around the hijacked ship the entire time, which made them nervous and uneasy.

He pointed out that he and the other released hostages are in a good physical health but in a bad mental condition, and that they had nervous fits and blood pressure problems.

The sailor called the cook of the St. James Park a hero because he managed to hide food from the Somali pirates and help the crew survive this way as the kidnapped men were only given rice; the goats that were sent to the ship never made it to the crew members. The 35-37 pirates who were guarding the ship had their faces covered the entire time.

“The Somalis took everything they could from the ship. They even took the pens from the desks. They also wanted to strip off my only pair of jeans off me, the ones that I am wearing right now,” disclosed the Deputy Captain of the St. James Park.

In his words, the pirates did exert pressure and treated the hostages badly, especially when they would get drunk or would use drugs, by threatening them and shooting close to their heads.

According to Rusev, his party was lucky because they were arrested in a relatively small room, and because the ship had a system for producing fresh water.

Some of the sailors said they would not sail again after their Somali captivity; they believe, however, that the UK operator of the ship, the company Zodiac, did a very good job releasing them.

The St. James Park ship was on its way to Thailand on December 29, 2009, when Somali pirates hijacked it in the Gulf of Aden, a body of water between Somalia and Yemen.

The 13,924-tonne ship's had 26 crew from Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Georgia, India, Turkey and the Philippines.

The Somali pirates released the vessel operated by the UK company Zodiac on May 14, but there is no information about the amount of the ransom that was paid.

After its release, the St. James tanker went to Oman where the sailors underwent medical examinations and were interrogated by the authorities.

The 8 Bulgarian sailors from the Asian Glory cargo vessel hijacked two days after St. James Park remain in Somali captivity as do the 15-member crew of the Bulgarian-flagged ship MV Panega hijacked in mid-May.

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