THE ESCAPE

PHUKET/DAKAR, SEPTEMBER 2015

It looks like a reckless disappearing act, but in reality it is preposterously simple. One day the Kunlun is suddenly gone. Five men board the ship, start the engine, raise the anchor and cut and run, away from port fines, arrest orders and Thai battleships. Six hundred and fifty-six tons of steel wanted by Interpol and captured in Thailand, missing without a trace.

When fishing captain José Regueiro Sevilla navigates the Kunlun away from the tropical holiday island of Phuket on the morning of 8 September, he has with him 181 tons of Patagonian toothfish that were seized by the authorities a half year ago. In the fuel tanks the Kunlun has recently received, with the approval of the port authorities, 80,000 litres of bunker fuel.

It’s almost as if the authorities in Phuket want the ship to disappear.

When the news of the escape reaches Peter Hammarstedt, he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“Sigh …,” he writes in an email to the authors.

Then he fires off a torrent of abuse on Sea Shepherd’s website – not against Thailand, but against two nations he thinks should have done a great deal more to stop the ship and seize the catch.

“When we criticized Australia and New Zealand for not arresting the Kunlun at sea, authorities in those two countries assured the international community that the most effective tool in the fight against these poachers was port state controls. If the vessel had been arrested by Australia or New Zealand, the catch would never have been returned. Instead, Australia and New Zealand’s unwillingness to arrest the Kunlun and seize its catch at sea has allowed this poaching operation to continue, and to profit from its crimes,” the Sea Shepherd captain writes.1

Then Hammarstedt and Captain Sid Chakravarty decide to take on the search for the Kunlun.

Since he had to leave the Kunlun in the Southern Ocean a few months before, Chakravarty has pondered a great deal over the ship. Now the Kunlun is the perfect prey for Operation Icefish 2, a daring outlaw on the run, more famous and notorious than the Thunder. The next few days Chakravarty studies recent satellite photos of the Kunlun’s possible escape routes, but he doesn’t see anything resembling the white painted fugitive.

Sea Shepherd’s flagship the Steve Irwin is prepared for another expedition to the shadowlands to search for the last two members of “The Bandit 6” – the Kunlun and the Viking.

Most of those involved in Interpol’s Operation Spillway are extremely disappointed with the authorities in Thailand. One man comprehends, someone who has worked closely with the Thai fisheries authorities, Glen Salmon with the Australian AFMA. He shrugs off the critique from Hammarstedt and Sea Shepherd.

“For some there is no other acceptable outcome than these boats getting sunk and the master going to jail for the rest of his life. Most countries don’t have laws like that. They haven’t fished in your waters, your laws are not strong and you are not going to get a seizure of the vessel or a large financial penalty, just some sort of a fine, maybe. That is not good enough for the rest of the world,” he says.

“When this vessel went out of their port, it was probably the best day of their lives. It was like an albatross hanging around their neck.”

In Thailand the authorities point accusing fingers at one another. Neither the port authorities, the customs officers nor the Navy want to take the blame. Finally the charade comes to an end with the transfer of three customs agents in Phuket.

While the pursuers argue among themselves, the Kunlun sails towards Dakar with a hand-picked crew who are experts at not attracting attention. All electronic equipment that can disclose the position of the vessel is turned off, and a new name is written on a steel plate and attached to the railing by simple wires. When the ship arrives in Senegal, its name is the Asian Warrior.

At the harbour in Dakar the 181 tons of toothfish are loaded into containers and shipped to Vietnam on one of the container ships of the world’s largest shipping company, the Danish Maersk. The bill of lading states Thon en vrac congele – frozen tuna fish in bulk.

Had Interpol known that the Kunlun’s sister vessel the Yongding had stolen into Dakar and unloaded 268 tons of toothfish worth EUR 3.5 million a few months before the Kunlun came to the same harbour, they would also have known where to search for the ship.

Yet again “Tucho” and his sons “Toño” and “Naño” Vidal are one step ahead of their pursuers.

Then fishing captain José Regueiro Sevilla makes a mistake that will be enormously costly for the Vidal family.

After having spent half a year getting the ship and fish out of Phuket, then a couple of months sailing across the Indian Ocean and up the western side of the African continent, on the evening of 1 December, José Regueiro Sevilla boards an Iberia flight in Dakar. It is the only direct flight from the West African country to Madrid and the quickest route home for Sevilla and the four others who have been on the Kunlun’s final voyage.

Four hours later they land in Madrid. When Sevilla passes through the Schengen control, the alarm goes off.

Everyone who shows their passport at the Schengen control in Madrid is checked every day against the Spanish police’s database of wanted persons of interest and criminals. And now the Spanish police investigators are secretly monitoring José Regueiro Sevilla’s movements, but Sevilla doesn’t learn about this. It is his employer the police are interested in.

After all the hardships and months at sea, had Sevilla only spent a few extra hours on his trip home to Spain by stopping over in France, Portugal or any other Schengen nation and shown his passport there, the Spanish police would probably never have noticed that he arrived from Dakar.

Now they know where to search. And yet again, random events conspire against the Vidal family.

When Sevilla lands in Madrid, a Spanish police investigator is meeting with two fisheries officers from Senegal in Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon. As soon as the investigator receives word that Sevilla has just arrived from Dakar, he tells the two Senegalese officers that they very likely have a vessel wanted by Interpol in their harbour. When they come home, the Senegalese officers find a ship that fits the description – the Asian Warrior.

Now things happen quickly. The containers of toothfish from the Kunlun are traced to the North Vietnamese seaport Haiphong. There they are stopped and inspected by local authorities. Then samples of the fish are taken to confirm that it is Patagonian toothfish and not tuna fish, as stated on the bill of lading.

At the seaport in Haiphong the inspection officers behave as if it were an ordinary control procedure so the owner of the cargo won’t suspect that Interpol and the Spanish police are involved.

For one year the cargo of frozen toothfish has been on a circumnavigation of the world from the Southern Ocean to Thailand, then around the entire African continent, past the Horn of Africa, across the Indian Ocean and into the South China Sea before ending up in Vietnam.

All this for a few million euro.