17th January: the activists — Australian Benjamin Potts, 28, and Briton Giles Lane, 35 — were detained Tuesday after boarding the harpoon ship to protest Japan’s whaling programme. They were handed over to Austrialia’s ‘Ocean Viking’ earlier today.
A Japanese whaling ship late Thursday handed over to an Australian customs vessel two anti-whaling activists who climbed aboard two days earlier, an official from Japan’s Fisheries Agency said.
Australia sent the customs ship, the Oceanic Viking, to the Japanese whaling ship in a bid to end the stand-off involving the activists of the militant Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
“Two Sea Shepherd activists who intruded onto the Yushin Maru No 2 and have been in custody on the ship were handed over to the Oceanic Viking chartered by the Australian government,” Hideaki Okada, a whaling official at the Fisheries Agency in Tokyo, told AFP early Friday.
More at http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gzy-7LzEluJCEYZWmJXa_MiYpOcQ and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7193212.stm
Hopefully they will be returned back to Sea Shepherd’s ‘Steve Irwin’ very soon, that is the plan.
Back to destroying whaling…
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Antarctic Whale Defense Campaign
Operation Migaloo 07-08
For more details, see http://www.seashepherd.org/migaloo/index.html