Unseenlabs detects suspicious vessels engaged in illegal fishing in the Arabian Sea
Unseenlabs, a French company specialized in radio frequency signal detection from space, has conducted an acquisition campaign over a period of several days in the Arabian Sea to detect the presence of non-cooperative vessels (without active AIS beacons), and to identify several vessels likely to be engaged in illegal or unreported fishing.
Unseenlabs conducted 13 days of radio frequency signal acquisition from vessels operating in this area. This campaign allowed us to identify 2 cases of obviously undeclared entries into the EEZ:
- Case number 1: Indian Exclusive Economic Zone
- Case number 2: Omani Exclusive Economic Zone.
During this period, Unseenlabs satellites located fishing vessels that shut down their AIS signal for several hours (or days) to become invisible. They entered Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) to fish and often left to unload their cargo in other vessels with large storage capacity, located outside these EEZs.
