Fiji links to high seas shooting video dismissed

Transcript

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 on Monday amid speculation the shot men shown floating among wreckage were Fijian.

Mr Southwick told Sally Round the footage didn't make sense so he decided to do his own digging.

GRAHAME SOUTHWICK: 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, all sorts of things, 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, they're not Fijians being shot, these are Somali pirates that got shot'. That explained a lot of the things that we saw in the video that didn't make sense.

SALLY ROUND: What didn't make sense to you?

GS: First of all why were there three or four tuna boats all congregated together because they never do that. They really spread out and they rarely even see each other. Why were they all grouped up? Why were the shooters letting themselves be filmed and identifying themselves and identifying the call signs on the boats and dancing and celebrating which is not the thing you do if you've just shot some people in the water, innocent people in the water. It didn't seem to make sense. When we finally talked to the Taiwanese they told us no, what happened was that one of the Taiwanese boats got attacked by Somali pirates actually and they called for help to their other Taiwanese boats that are in the area, 50 or 60 miles away. They congregated together and apparently rammed the pirate boat and sank it and the footage you see and the wreckage you see is the pirate boat and these guys clinging to the wreckage of the pirate boat. And they told me on one or all of the boats they had armed guards because that was the practice for boats fishing off the Somali coast, they had armed guards on board. So they decided they'd take care of the pirates themselves.

SR: And was this brought to light? Did this come to court at all?

GS: One wouldn't think so and it would be not unusual not to because first of all that sort of thing usually happens outside any kind of national jurisdiction, 12 miles off the coast and when all this stuff was going on off Somalia there were heaps of Somali pirate stories and it was just another story that got lost in the mix.

SR: So how did the Fiji connection come in then?

GS: That's the thing now of interest to the Fiji authorities and the police here, I'm told, are investigating that point - who was it that concocted the story that it was Fijians being shot in the water and for what purpose?

SR: Have you ever heard of any such incidents happening in the waters around Fiji?

GS: No piracy obviously but there have been lots of incidents of fights on board ships and stabbings and people being thrown overboard and there'll be four or five, maybe ten a year, incidents, of boats coming back with dead people on board or people missing on board. We all know what happens here if there's a fight, and if there's a fatal fight on the boat, well generally there's no evidence come back. Somebody's mysteriously fallen over the side, and nobody knows anything but if a person dies of natural causes, they're usually brought back in the freezer or something and there's a report and a bit of a newspaper story and that's it. But generally these fights and things on fishing boats, they're outside Fiji's jurisdiction, they're out on the high seas, there's nobody who can really do much about it and they rarely get reported other than just general talk around the docks.

SR: Does that concern you, clashes going on, and nothing being done about it?

GS: It does concern us but the key thing here is there's nothing much you can do about it. These are not happening on domestic boats, they are not happening on boats that we have any control over, these are happening all on the foreign boats over which we have no control and outside of Fiji's jurisdiction so everybody just sort of shrugs their shoulders and says well, this is what happens when you fish for six months, a year at a time in confined spaces and then you start a little argument over food or somebody's taken somebody's shoes or something and the next thing there's a full-on brawl, stabbing on the boats, and that's what happens.

Grahame Southwick says he has passed the information on to the Fiji authorities.

The Fiji police say they have asked for help from Interpol to establish the facts.