The Icelandic Coast Guard and the special police intervention unit (the so-called Viking Squad) seized the ship Bandero, operated by the Captain Paul Watson Foundation of the famous activist Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd organization, late on Friday evening. The captain was arrested and the ship was towed to the port in Reykjavík. Iceland Monitor ↗
Bandero had been pursuing the Icelandic whaling ship Hvalur 9, which belongs to the controversial company Hvalur hf. The whaling ship's crew asked the coast guard for help after, in their own words, they felt threatened and the captain of Bandero was not responding to their instructions. Iceland Review ↗
The coast guard's operations center recorded that Bandero had sailed into Iceland's twelve-mile territorial waters and was heading directly toward the whaling ship. Duty officers called on it to leave the waters, but received no response. They subsequently also dispatched a helicopter with the same instruction — the captain ignored it as well, even after the patrol vessel Freyja arrived at the ship and ordered him to stop the engines. IceNews ↗
Paul Watson was made famous by the documentary series Whale Wars. In 2024 he himself ended up in custody in Greenland following a Japanese extradition request related to earlier protests against whalers — he was released after several months. Icelandic whaling remains an internationally controversial topic, as the country is among the last that still permit commercial whaling. DV ↗
Icelandic Coast Guard seized ship of activists who were chasing whaling ship Hvalur 9
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