A chilling voice note from her husband was all the warning Indonesian housewife Shanty Shanaya received of his impending kidnapping in some of the world’s most treacherous waters.

“I’m about to be attacked,” her 33-year-old husband, Captain Ashari Samadikun, said in the April 21 voice note threaded with fear as a group he assumed to be pirates approached.

He was captaining the Palau-flagged MT Honour 25 tanker, which was carrying fuel from Oman to Somalia – a route once notorious for pirates who appear to be staging a comeback timed with the movement of navy ships to the Strait of Hormuz 1,700km to the north.

“I started crying. It was like I had been hit by a bolt of lightning,” Shanaya, who lives in Gowa Regency in South Sulawesi, told This Week in Asia. “I couldn’t believe what he had just said.”

The 26-year-old desperately messaged back, but received no reply. Then his phone appeared to be switched off.

For three days, the mother of two young daughters, aged six and four, could do nothing but wait and pray. Then, out of the blue, she got a video call from her husband.

“I could see him sitting on the ship, looking well, but surrounded by pirates who were all heavily armed,” Shanaya said. “He told me that he was OK, and that the crew were being allowed to eat and pray. I was just stunned.”