State Minister for Shipping Khalid Mahmud Chowdhury today hoped that the 23 crew members of hijacked Bangladeshi ship "MV Abdullah" could be rescued by this month.

"The entire situation is now under our control . . . the 23 crew members of hijacked Bangladeshi ship MV Abdullah could be rescued by this month," the state minister told journalists at his secretariat office here today.

Replying to a question, he said rescuing the crew members of cargo ship MV Abdullah, which was hijacked by Somali pirates on March 12, is not a trifling job. "Work is going on . . . We hope, we will be able to bring back the 23 crew members safely and hand them over to their families safely," he added.

The Department of Shipping is contacting the crew members regularly and they all are safe and sound, the state minister said, adding that efforts are going on to rescue them through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

"We had a plan to bring them back before the Eid-ul-Fitr but we couldn`t do that. We hope that they will be brought back shortly," he said.

Somali pirates hijacked the ship with 23 crew members on board on March 12 when it was sailing from Maputo in Mozambique to Al Hamriyah in the UAE with 58,000 tonnes of coal. BSS