Argentine forces opened fire on and sank a Chinese boat illegally fishing in the South Atlantic after it attempted to ram a coast guard vessel, officials said on Tuesday.
A video posted on the coast guard’s Web site showed a large Chinese boat listing in the open sea while apparently under pursuit.
Poaching of fish is a perennial problem in the Atlantic and Southern Ocean, and has sometimes seen law enforcement agencies pursue violators for weeks on end at sea, but it is highly unusual for such incidents to end with a vessel being sent to the sea floor.
The sinking comes as China expands its long-distance fishing fleet to meet a surging demand for seafood, with the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressing “serious concern” over the incident.
The coast guard said the Lu Yan Yuan Yu 010 was fishing without permission off Puerto Madryn, about 1,300km south of Buenos Aires on Tuesday, inside Argentina’s exclusive economic zone.
The ship refused requests in Spanish and English to be boarded, turning off its lights and attempting to flee toward international waters, the statement said.
“To protect our fishing resources, and given the [Chinese] boat’s refusal to be boarded, warning shots were fired,” it said. “The offending vessel carried out maneuvers to collide with the coast guard patrol. Thus the order was given to fire on different sections of the vessel, damaging it.”
The boat’s captain was due to be handed over to police and appear before a judge.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on its Web site it had received information that the 32 Chinese sailors on board had been rescued unhurt, four by the coast guard and the others by nearby Chinese boats.
Beijing “expressed serious concern about this incident, and called on Argentina to make an immediate and thorough investigation and report the details to China,” Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Lu Kang (陸慷) was cited as saying.
China is a key export market for Argentine agriculture and raw materials, and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) visited in 2014, when he said the two countries’ relationship was poised to reach unprecedented “new horizons.”
Illegal fishing is common in the waters of the South Atlantic, reportedly often involving Chinese or Russian vessels.
China is the world’s largest market for seafood and has the biggest overseas fishing fleet.
It has grown rapidly in recent decades to reach more than 2,460 vessels, which do most of their fishing off west Africa, according to research at Nanyang Technological University.
Last year Greenpeace said that at least 74 fishing vessels owned and operated by four Chinese distant water fishing companies had been exposed for fishing illegally off west Africa.
Argentina in 2012 said it captured two Chinese fishing vessels illegally fishing for squid in its exclusive economic zone, after firing warning shots.
At the time local reports said illegal Chinese fishing was often facilitated by corrupt officials within the Argentine government and coast guard.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the