Criminalisation of seafararers.

The International Transport Workers’ Federation communicated some sad news for seafararers around the globe today.

Konstantin Metelev, chief mate on the Coral Sea, died earlier this month in hospital. He had been detained for a year along with two other officers after Greek authorities found drugs in the cargo on their ship.

They were all cleared last year but Metelev was too ill to return home.

“We consider him another victim of the underserved criminalisation of seafarers,” the ITF said.

This subject is close to my heart. Some years ago, I interviewed Apostolos Mangouras, the master of the Prestige, the tanker that sank off Spain in 2002 and caused a devastating oil slick.

It was the only time he spoke to a journalist. He was facing – and still faces – the possibility of charges in a Spanish court.

Authorities in Spain allege that he disobeyed orders and was partly responsible for the spill. He claims he simply did his job and that, had the Spaniards allowed the vessel into a sheltered spot, it could have been saved.

I can understand why seafarers are targeted in this way, but I can’t accept it. It’s the age old scapegoat tactic. Seafarers are easy targets.

Cross-Strait traffic…

Moroccan and Spanish law enforcement agencies seized nearly 181 tonnes of hashish last year during a concerted crackdown on smuggling across the Strait of Gibraltar.

The impact of these operations on the smuggling networks is hard to gauge because the exact level of cannabis production in Morocco is not known.

But there is no doubt that on both side of the Strait, the clandestine flow of drugs is coming under increased scrutiny.

During the course of 2008, Moroccan authorities seized close to 111 tonnes of hashish and 33.5 tonnes of cocaine, according to official figures released this week.

The purge of drug traffickers continued this year with the dismantling of an extensive international network that involved police and military officers in northern Morocco.

The judge investigating Morocco’s largest drugs ring has so far interrogated 79 suspects, including 61 who were serving in the police or the armed forces at the time of their arrest.

The suspects are accused of involvement in conspiracy, international drug trafficking and corruption.

The Moroccan network is said to have links to criminal groups in Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Melilla.

In Spain, Guardia Civil officers based in Algeciras seized nearly 70 tonnes of hashish last year and 177 kilos of cocaine.

Just over half of the Spanish haul was confiscated in the ports of Algeciras and Tarifa, where smugglers use all sorts of tricks to get the drugs through. In the picture, a Guardia Civil officer finds hash blocks inside a car wheel.

The rest of the total haul was the result of operations against organised crime in this region.

Proximity to Morocco, the world’s largest producer of cannabis resin, makes the Strait of Gibraltar a key transit point for clandestine shipments of drugs into Europe.

Throughout the year, Spain’s SIVE coastal radar system has helped detect fast speedboats as they transit the Strait toward the Spanish coastline.

Scary bird!

How cool is this pic? That’s me with a GOLDEN EAGLE on my arm!! I was terrified! Its beak was the size of a large fist and it weighed a tonne…

This was taken by Johnny Bugeja, the Chronicle photographer, quite a while back now. I found it today while I was looking through an old disc drive. It was snapped in Gibraltar while I was researching an article on the raptor unit run by the Gibraltar Ornithological and Natural History Society (www.gonhs.org)

These guys are great. Gibraltar is a key staging post for migrating birds of prey, but is also home to flocks of vicious seagulls. Many raptors are attacked and end up injured. The GONHS team cares for them and reintroduces them imto the wild.

They are also involved in conservation programs, both in Gibraltar and around the world. A first class effort!

Here’s the article, first published in the Gibraltar Chronicle.

Could the Fedra have been saved?

Inaki Carreras, a formidable Spanish journalist who writes for the specialist Spanish magazine Transporte XXI, hus dug up some interesting snippets about the Fedra.

According to his sources, the captain refused to take a towline from the tugs who were at the scene for most of the day as the vessel drifted toward the shore.

He was allegedly following instructions from his managers, who had apparently sealed a salvage contract with another company whose tugs had yet to arrive.

The Fedra drifted out of control for several hours before running aground on cliffs at Europa Point in Gibraltar last October 10.

This sort of situation doesn’t surprise. I’ve seen it before in other cases. The difference here, however, is that unlike most other cases, the Fedra was no more than a mile from a lee shore. There was no room for error.

Could the ship have been saved? Yes, according to Transporte XXI. But who knows? What is clear though is that the maritime industry must do something to address this sort of barter situation in extreme salvage cases.

In this sort of scenario, it could quite easily have cost lives.

Pirates: Follow the money…

The UN has announced plans to target the people who finance pirate activities from the safety of dry land. It is a logical step that will add pressure on these criminal gangs, many of whom are financed from outside Somalia by unidentified backers who are making big bucks out of each hijacked vessel.

But given that Somalia is a lawless state, how easy will this proposal be to put into practice? With the focus on the war on terror, do western law enforcement agencies have the resources to do this properly?

I looked into these issues for an article in Lloyd’s List and found that this is going to prove a complex task. And for one expert I spoke to, it’s a misguided one. The real effort, he said, should be focused on finding a longterm solution to the violence and instability in Somali that fuels piracy in the first place.

Refinery growth…

I took a tour of a nearby refinery complex yesterday. It’s owned by Spanish energy giant CEPSA and is the busiest refinery on the Iberian Peninsula, refining nearly 12m tonnes of product last year. It’s under expansion and new investments will boost refining capacity as from next month.

Good news if you own a car, or a ship, or a plane, I suppose. We all need to refuel. Not so good news, however, if you live nearby. CEPSA officials insist that the refinery, one of the oldest in Europe, meets all the relevant rules on emissions and so on.

That may well be the case, but the fact is that when communities are clustered so near to expanding petrochemical industries, the impact on quality of life is noticeable.

CEPSA creates jobs in the area, undoubtedly, and generates knock-on revenue for many businesses both in Spain and Gibraltar. But at what price?

Just five or six decades ago, this southernmost corner of Spain overlooking Morocco must have been a priceless gem. Now, it’s an industrial nightmare of belching chimney stacks, iron and steel. A pity.

Four years…

At a sentencing yesterday, the woman who last week admitted killing her husband was sentenced to four years in jail.

I can’t make up my mind about this. It seems like a very short sentence given the crime, but the circumstances were certainly complicated, and sad.

I don’t know her personally but those who do say she’s a kind person and that this was one of those tragic incidents.

In the UK, the average sentence for manslaughter in a domestic setting is around five years, so I guess the judge’s decision this week ties in with that.

Either way the woman, whatever jail term, will carry the events of that night with her for the rest of her life. So too the family of the victim.

All in all, not a good result whichever way you look at it.

Murder, a dramatic twist…

In a completely unexpected turn of events, the local woman charged with murdering her partner pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter.

Her defence barrister told the jury that the decision came in the light of “extremely significant” evidence  given by a UK pathologist.

She pleaded not guilty to murder, but guilty to manslaughter by reason of provocation.

Under local law, ‘provocation’ is one of the partial defences by which an offence that would otherwise be murder may be reduced to manslaughter.

The key difference between a charge of murder and one of manslaughter is that in the latter, there is no malice forethought ahead of the killing.

In sentencing terms, it can potentially mean a significantly shorter period in jail, particularly in domestic cases.

The judge told her she could “almost certainly” expect an immediate custodial sentence when she is sentenced next Monday.

Murder, a rare occurence…

Murders are rare in Gibraltar, but that’s what’s keeping me busy this week.

I’m covering the trial of a woman accused of stabbing her long term partner with a kitchen knife.

It’s only day two and I’m not sure which way the defence is going to go with this. In the British system, the prosecution has it’s turn first which means that, so far, it’s all a bit one-sided. We’ll see.

As always with these things, the trial is filled with unsavoury, highly personal details. I never enjoy covering these cases, though I realise it comes with the territory. But in a small community like Gibraltar, it’s often quite uncomfortable. Such is life.

Here’s day one.

And day two.

Goodbye to the Fedra wreck…

 

SALVORS have succeeded in pulling the bow section of the cargo ship Fedra off rocks at Europa Point in Gibraltar.

The vessel ran aground and broke in two in a severe storm last October.

The wreck removal operation was overseen by Titan Salvage and involved several tugs.

Once free of the rocks, the Russian tug Neftegaz 57 [pictured above] towed the bow section into deeper water in the Bay of Gibraltar, where it is now anchored.

Divers have surveyed the section and will have to remove jagged pieces of steel from the ship’s double bottom, which was ripped apart by weeks of grinding against a rocky seabed.

Once that is done, the section will be towed into the port of Gibraltar, where it will be dismantled and sold for scrap.

The vessel’s accommodation block was removed some weeks ago and will also be scrapped in Gibraltar.

Only the Fedra’s engine room and funnel remain at Europa Point, pinned at the base of sheer cliffs.

The operation to remove that piece of the ship will resume in a few weeks time with the onset of calmer weather.

The 63,940 dwt, Liberia-flag Fedra, operated by Dilek Transport, dragged anchor for hours during a severe storm last October 10, unable to hold its position before running aground at Europa Point. 

Other ships in the area had heaved anchor and moved into deeper waters but the Fedra was unable to sail away from land because its engine was out of action.

It later emerged that the ship’s engine had been dismantled for repairs and that the crew had not told local port authorities that their vessel was effectively ‘dead’.

The Fedra’s captain was charged with breaching port regulations and faces a small fine if convicted.

After the ship ran aground, its 31-man crew was saved following a daring but risky night-time rescue by Gibraltarian and Spanish emergency services, in which Titan’s personnel also played a decisive role.

Chinese spooks in the bay…

Just over a year ago, I wrote a story for the Gibraltar Chronicle looking at the activity of Chinese-owned merchant ship in the Bay of Gibraltar. A guy I know who works in the maritime sector was intrigued by the fact that every time a western navy ship called at Gibraltar, a Chinese ship appeared in the bay. His theory was simple: the Chinese, ever increasing their presence worldwide, were engaged in Cold War-style espionage just like the Russians used to do with their fleet of spy trawlers.

It sounded fanciful but I looked into it and found that the US military, in particular, was keenly interested in the possibility. I also tracked vessel movements and found that my source was right. For every frigate or submarine in port, there were several Chinese ships in the bay, often the same vessels on different occasions. I also found a lot of open-source material that seemed to back up the possibility of Chinese spy ships, including a de-classified report from the US Senate´s intelligence committee.

I penned a cautous story for the Gibraltar Chronicle and promptly forgot about it until, several weeks later, I started receiving emails from a chap in China asking me to contribute to a military magazine that he described as the Chinese equivalent of Janes. My US military contacts had clear ideas what this was all about, describing it as a contact from the outer fringes of the Chinese state intelligence-gathering network. I´m not that sure and I wasn´t keen to send anything through to Mr Wang.

Why am I writing all this now? After months of silence, I just received another email from him. New Year resolution: revisit this subject.

Business opportunities off Somalia…

The New Year has brought no respite in the number of piracy attacks off Somalia. The EU task force has helped foil an attack, while the French navy has reportedly captured a handful of pirates. But there are reports too of a couple of vessels taken by force. No change, then, from the final weeks of 2008.

In this climate, a growing number of private military contractors continue to offer their services to shipowners. Espada, a US-basec company, is the latest to step into the market, according to this report in a Texas business newspaper.

As always, the article is scant on specifics and the company declines to say much other than sell its services in generic terms. This topic will run and run in the coming months. High on my list of New Year resolutions is to find someone who will describe, in detail, what is actually happening with these guys at sea.

As an interesting aside, I also found this blog dedicated to the issue of modern day piracy. Journalist Daniel Sekulich is writing a book on the subject and has some insightful comments, as well as some good links to useful resources.