SUEZ: Egyptian fishermen who escaped Somali pirates this month received a hero’s welcome when they sailed into port at the southern end of the Suez Canal on Sunday.

Family, friends, well-wishers and officials were on hand to greet the 34 men on their return after their two fishing vessels, the Momtaz 1 and Samara Ahmed, were hijacked in April.

The men overpowered their armed captors on Aug. 13 and sailed in the two vessels, bringing eight pirates with them. At least seven dead pirates were found in the sea by their colleagues afterward, an associate of the pirates has said.

Egyptian security met the returning vessels at sea and took the eight captive pirates to an undisclosed location for questioning.

Wearing brand new tracksuits, the nearly three dozen fishermen disembarked in the port city of Suez into the waiting arms of hundreds of relatives and friends, as traditional Egyptian drummers and dancers performed in the background. One mother fainted from the joy of seeing her son return.

One fisherman, El-Shahat Ragab, pushed through crowds on the dock searching for his mother, who wept as they were reunited. “They starved us and dealt with us rudely. They beat us and scorned us,” Ragab said of the pirates. Another fisherman told journalists how pirates had used diminishing drinking water to bathe and constantly threatened to set fire to the boats with the fishermen onboard.

“Thanks be to God, the two ships tried to cooperate with each other and we were protected by God,” said El-Sayyed Sobhi, another member of the crew. “There were days we didn’t think we’d survive. We were so humiliated and went to sleep hungry every day.”

The fishermen spoke freely of how harrowing the experience had been, but were cagey about exactly how they managed to overpower their captors and seize eight of them.

When pressed on how they managed to escape, Sobhi he said they were aided by Somali gunmen who boarded the ship and helped attack the pirates — corroborating the version of events provided by the owner of one of the boats, Mohammad Nasr, who said the owner of the second vessel, Hassan Khalil, hired the Somalis.

But Khalil, who was present at Sunday’s homecoming, denied he hired the gunmen. He refused to comment on Nasr’s claim that he paid the pirates a down payment of $200,000 in order to board his boat, Momtaz 1, and set in motion the rescue plan. “It’s none of your business. It is between God and us,” he told AFP.