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Conservationist Paul Watson, known for his work with Greenpeace, the founding of Sea Shepherd, and more recently Neptune Pirates, has been taken into police custody in Denmark.
Knewz.com has learned that the 73-year-old was at Nuuk Harbor in Greenland aboard his ship, John Paul DeJoria, when a tactical law-enforcement team boarded it with an international warrant for his arrest.
The warrant, known as a Red Notice, was reissued by Japan allegedly in secret so that it would not deter Watson from his plans to make his presence felt by yet another of its whaling ships, the Kangei Maru.
The ship’s operations manager, Locky MacLean, recounted the arrest, saying: “We were immediately boarded by a SWAT team and … police who wasted no time in cuffing Paul Watson, our founder, and arresting him on a decades old Red Notice at the request of Japan.”
Footage released to the press depicted the Danish police leading the activist off the vessel into a waiting vehicle.
Rob Read, Chief of the United Kingdom’s Neptune Pirates operations, shared concerns from many of Watson’s followers about the potential impact of the legal action on the septuagenarian.
“Paul could face 15 years in prison, likely a life sentence for him. [It was] a total ambush by Japan using an unpublished Interpol warrant newly submitted in March this year.”
“The Red Notice had disappeared a few months ago. We were surprised because it could mean that it had been erased or made confidential.”
“We understand now that Japan made it confidential to lure Paul into a false sense of security. We implore the Danish government to release Captain Watson and not entertain this politically-motivated request.”
As a nod to Read’s remark about the Red Notice, the Captain Paul Watson Foundation (CPWF) has released a statement on Facebook saying:
“This development comes as a surprise since the Foundation’s lawyers had reported that the Red Notice had been withdrawn. However, it appears that Japan had made the notice confidential to facilitate Paul’s travel for the purpose of making an arrest.”
“Although Japan has operated in violation of the ICJ (International Court of Justice) ruling for several years, they ceased Antarctic high-seas whaling in 2016 and now only hunt whales within their territorial waters.”
“CPWF suspects that Japan intends to resume high-seas whaling in the Southern Ocean and North Pacific by 2025, and believes the reactivation of the Red Notice against Captain Watson is politically motivated, coinciding with the launch of the new factory ship,” the statement said.
The Kangei Maru, also referred to as “the mothership of whaling,” is a 370-foot, 9,300-ton vessel launched in June 2024.
It is even bigger than its predecessor, the retired Nisshin Maru, which had many brushes with marine conservation activists and received the moniker “floating slaughterhouse”.
According to a report by CNN News, the latest supplement to Japan’s whaling efforts is said to have a range of 8,000 miles and is capable of staying at sea for 60 days at a time leading to speculations that the ship owner, Kyodo Senpaku, plans on whaling a lot further abroad than just Japan’s territorial waters.
Senpaku has since rubbished the speculations.