Transcript
The head of one of the region's key fishing agencies, the Parties to the Nauru Agreement, says he has witnessed clashes at sea over fishing but nothing as tragic as the killing of several men on the high seas, portrayed in a Youtube video yesterday.
The Fiji police are investigating the video which shows several men, floating among wreckage, being shot and killed by a gunman aboard a vessel as another large boat floats in the background.
Transform Aqorau who is the CEO of the Parties to the Nauru Agreement says he has been in touch with the Forum Fisheries Agency which has made attempts to identify one of the vessels.
Mr Aqorau says there is almost a war going on over fish aggregating devices, known as "fads" which are used to attract fish.
TRANSFORM AQORAU: Well I've only just seen it from what everyone else has seen and it's just tragic, it's just terrible, it's a terrible tragedy and I think if we can authenticate the video and try and chase up where these boats are from, I know that for one of them we've been able to, from information that I've got from some contacts at FFA who contacted Sea-web one of the boats you can see the international radio call sign. It's a Taiwanese vessel and of course you can hear from the conversations that are going on in the video that they are Asians, probably Mandarin or Cantonese but it's just a terrible, terrible tragedy to see that and we should do something, both at the government level and make sure these boats are not licensed in the region. They're not rogue, that's murder.
PHILIPPA TOLLEY: Do you think this is an indication of the sort of things that we don't normally see on Youtube but that do happen amongst the competing fishing boats out there?
TA: I spent some time on a fishing vessel and I know for fad fishing there's almost like a fad war going on at sea where everyone is going out and cutting each other's fads and there's almost near clashes when a vessel is checking on its fad and someone else is retrieving someone else's fad, so yeah, there are these things going on at sea. This in particular is right there at the top of very very sad incidents. But we know some fishing boats, I know of an incident in Kiribati a few years ago when a few people got lost, and they waved fishing vessels and they were just ignored, so those things happen, but I've never seen people just being shot.
