After holding him for six days, Vietnam sent Mas Gun back to Indonesia. “This was not a hostage situation but a rescue effort,” said Rifky Effendi Hardijanto, Indonesia’s secretary-general of the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries, during a subsequent press conference in which he cast the Vietnamese Coast Guard more as savior than as aggressor. In later interviews, the Indonesian government told reporters that Mas Gun had been driving one of several arrested Vietnamese fishing boats back to shore when his boat began sinking and the Vietnamese Coast Guard saved him.
