Special operation nets Panamanian trawler in Sea of Okhotsk
Russian border guards have detained a Panamanian trawler, Star Wind, flying a Cambodian flag in the Sea of Okhotsk, a local border guard spokesman said Monday according to RIA Novosti.
The trawler was detained in Russian territorial waters by border guards and escorted to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky port for further investigation.
This is the fourth vessel to be detained for similar violations by Russian boarder guards in the past 10 days as part of operation Typhoon 2007, a special border operation conducted annually in the Far East between mid-January and mid-April.
The captain of the Kurilskaya Gryada trawler was earlier fined 1.74 billion rubles for poaching. The captains of the Sakhalin vessels Kinsey Maru 5 and Ekarma-3 were both fined 630,000 rubles and more than 234,000 rubles respectively.
Russian authorities have been involved in several disputes in recent years over fishing rights in its Far East waters.
In August, the captain of a Japanese vessel was arrested near the Kuril Islands off Russia's Pacific coast in an incident in which one of his crewmates was shot and killed by Russian border guards. Russian officials said the vessel was suspected of illegally fishing for valuable crab in Russian waters, and that border guards had fired warning shots only after it had refused to stop.
