Six members of a 16-person crew on a Liberia-flagged tanker were held hostage by pirates who boarded the ship in West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea last week, according to the Danish shipper that owns the vessel. Pirates reportedly boarded the Monjasa Reformer near Port Pointe-Noire, Congo, on March 25 and five days later, the French Navy that was patrolling the area, found the ship off the island of Sao Tomé and Principe north of where the pirates boarded. “The pirates had abandoned the vessel and brought some of the crew members with them,” a statement by company spokesman Thorstein Andreasen said. It did not say how they were taken. After the pirates boarded the vessel, the crew sought refuge in a safe area on the ship called a citadel which is the anti-piracy emergency protocol. In spite of this, the pirates somehow managed to take some of the crew hostage. Eventually the six were rescued from an undisclosed location in Nigeria.