19 Aug 2014

Shooting video thought to be old footage of Somali pirates

5:26 pm on 19 August 2014

The president of the Fiji Tuna Boat Association, Grahame Southwick, says footage of men being shot on the high seas is most likely film of a piracy incident off the Somali coast taken last year.

The Fiji police are investigating the video which surfaced on the internet yesterday amid speculation the shot men shown floating among wreckage were Fijian.

Mr Southwick says the footage, which also showed several fishing boats congregating on the high seas, with one clearly identified as Taiwanese, did not make sense.

He says he decided to call his own Taiwan fishing contacts.

"Of course the Taiwan fleet pretty well all over the world talk to each other all the time in the Indian Ocean or the Pacific. They talk about fish catches, what's going on, so news spreads fairly quickly and they said 'oh yes, we know about this story. This is something that happened off the Somali Coast in 2013 and no, these aren't Fijians being shot, these are Somali pirates that got shot."

Grahame Southwick says he has passed the information on to the Fiji authorities who are now more interested in why Fiji has been linked to the footage.