A militant anti-whaling group said yesterday it attacked a Japanese whaling vessel with "stink bombs," frustrating the hunt, only an hour after two of its activists were freed from the harpoon boat.
Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society vessel -- the Steve Irwin -- said his crew resumed its actions against the Japanese fleet shortly after the two men were handed to an Australian customs boat on Friday.
The pair -- Australian Benjamin Potts said Briton Giles Lane -- were held aboard the harpoon boat Yushin Maru No. 2 for two days after they clambered onboard on Tuesday to deliver a letter protesting the slaughter of whales.
"One hour after our people were released we then went after the Yushin Maru No. 2 and hit them with our stink bombs," Paul Watson, told reporters by telephone.
"What that will do is it makes it impossible to work on the deck for two days," he said.
The Sea Shepherd ship is in the icy waters off Antarctica to prevent Japanese whalers from carrying out their annual whale hunt, which this year will see about 1,000 of the giant creatures slaughtered.
Japan exploits a loophole in a 1986 international moratorium on commercial whaling to kill the animals for what it calls scientific research, while admitting the meat from the hunt ends up on dinner plates.
The Japanese company which owns the whaling vessels, Kyodo Senpaku Kaisha Ltd, condemned the butyric acid attacks on its ships which it likened to the work of terrorists.
"We safely released to an Australian patrol boat the intruders without any harm, even though Sea Shepherd has long threatened our safety," company president Kazuo Yamamoto said in a statement.
"The night attack is nothing more than an inhumane act for which they deserve to be called terrorists as they show no sign of honor as human beings," he said.
Watson said he had sent out a smaller boat to deliver the butyric acid bombs, or "stink bombs," which were intended to make the smell on deck so unpleasant that the whalers were unable to work.
"We are not down here hanging banners and taking pictures, we are down here to save whales," he said. "We are going to keep hitting these guys... as long as we don't hurt anybody."
"The most important thing is this is day number nine that no whales have been killed," he said.
Watson said the Steve Irwin, which had to follow the Australian customs boat some 80km away from the Japanese ship to collect its detained crew, was now searching for the Japanese fleet.
"We will continue to disrupt their activities," he said.
The whalers are also being carefully watched by Greenpeace activists, whose vessel Esperanza is trailing the factory ship the Nisshin Maru, which the environmentalists claim to have kept out of the hunt for six days.
"No whales have been killed in that time," expedition leader Karli Thomas said in a statement.
"Now we've got two whalers out of the hunting grounds. If they try to begin whaling, we'll carry out peaceful direct action by putting ourselves in front of the harpoons to defend the whales," Thomas said.
Meanwhile, Japanese diplomats and government officials will hold an emergency meeting soon to discuss measures to prevent future attacks against whaling vessels, the online edition of the Yomiuri Shimbun reported.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS