Latest news with #Togo-flagged
The Star
17-07-2025
- The Star
Greece arrests three over cocaine-loaded ship seized by Spain in 2023
FILE PHOTO: Police officers discharge drugs from the cattle ship Orion V that was seized off the Canary Islands, in the port of Las Palmas, in the island of Gran Canaria, Spain, January 26, 2023. REUTERS/Borja Suarez/File photo ATHENS (Reuters) -Greece has arrested three people linked with a cargo ship seized by Spanish authorities off the Canary Islands in 2023 for carrying more than 4.5 tons of cocaine from Latin America to Europe, three people close to the investigation said on Thursday. The then Greek-operated, Togo-flagged vessel Blume, which had left from Brazil, had declared a 200 tonne cargo of coffee, far below its actual capacity, raising suspicion.
Straits Times
17-07-2025
- Straits Times
Greece arrests three over cocaine-loaded ship seized by Spain in 2023
FILE PHOTO: Police officers discharge drugs from the cattle ship Orion V that was seized off the Canary Islands, in the port of Las Palmas, in the island of Gran Canaria, Spain, January 26, 2023. REUTERS/Borja Suarez/File photo ATHENS - Greece has arrested three people linked with a cargo ship seized by Spanish authorities off the Canary Islands in 2023 for carrying more than 4.5 tons of cocaine from Latin America to Europe, three people close to the investigation said on Thursday. The then Greek-operated, Togo-flagged vessel Blume, which had left from Brazil, had declared a 200 tonne cargo of coffee, far below its actual capacity, raising suspicion. On January 18, 2023, Spanish authorities raided the ship, confiscated the drugs worth hundreds of millions of dollars, arrested its entire crew and took the vessel to the port of Santa Cruz on the island of Tenerife. The three people detained this week by the Greek coast guard, following an investigation with the anti-money laundering unit, are believed to be linked to the vessel's Greece-based operator, Dignatio Corp, two officials from both units told Reuters. The suspects, who have initially denied wrongdoing, will appear before a prosecutor to respond to the charges in the coming days, according to a third source. Dignatio Corp could not be reached for comment. In 2023, six days after the interception of Blume, Spanish authorities seized a second Togo-flagged vessel, the cattle ship Orion V, off the Canary Islands, for transporting a similar amount of cocaine. The investigation was assisted by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and Togo police. REUTERS Top stories Swipe. Select. Stay informed. Singapore Fatal abuse of Myanmar maid in Bishan: Traffic Police officer sentenced to 10 years' jail Singapore Care model to improve trauma outcome in central S'pore fashioned after 'bicycle wheel' Singapore HSA launches anti-vaping checks near 5 institutes of higher learning Singapore Kpod vapes, zombie kids: Why it's time to raise the alarm Life 11 new entries on Singapore's Bib Gourmand list, including three re-entries at Old Airport Road Singapore 15 under police probe for sharing Singpass credentials used in scams Singapore NEA monitoring E. coli at Sentosa beaches after elevated bacteria levels delay World Aquatics events Life First look at the new Singapore Oceanarium at Resorts World Sentosa
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
China says Taiwan politicising cable damage issue, after ship's captain jailed
BEIJING (Reuters) -China's government on Friday said Taiwan was deliberately politicising the damage of undersea communication cables as part of a smear campaign, expressing anger after the island jailed a Chinese ship captain for an incident earlier this year. A Taiwanese court on Thursday sentenced the captain of the Togo-flagged ship to three years in jail after finding him guilty of intentionally damaging undersea cables off the island in February, in an incident that alarmed Taiwan officials. In a statement, China's Taiwan Affairs Office said that damage to maritime cables were "common accidents", saying Taiwan was hyping up the issue for political purposes. "The aim is to attack and smear the mainland, to stir up confrontation and antagonism across the Taiwan Strait," it said. "We express firm opposition to the Democratic Progressive Party authorities' manipulation of the legal system to pressure the mainland ship's captain, and demand they end the political manipulation of accidents," the office added, referring to Taiwan's ruling party. The captain's legal rights should be guaranteed, it added. Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory, has reported five cases of sea cable malfunctions this year, compared with three each in 2024 and 2023, according to its digital ministry.
Al Jazeera
11-04-2025
- Al Jazeera
Taiwan charges captain of China-linked ship with damaging subsea cable
Taiwanese prosecutors have formally charged the captain of a Chinese-crewed cargo ship that Taipei says severed one of its subsea cables earlier this year. The Togo-flagged Hong Tai 58 was detained by Taiwan's coastguard in February near the site of a cable breakdown amid allegations that it had deliberately dropped its anchor to cause damage. The ship's captain, who was only identified to the public by his surname Wang, was charged on Friday with being responsible for the incident, the prosecutors said. Seven Chinese nationals who were on board the ship will not be charged, and will be transported back to China, the prosecutors added. The case marks a first for Taiwan, where subsea cables have become the latest front in what is described as 'hybrid warfare' or 'grey zone activity' with China. The terms refer to low-grade coercive acts such as sabotage that hold a certain degree of plausible deniability. China has long claimed Taiwan, an island with a population of 23 million, as a province of the mainland and has threatened to annex it by force, if necessary. China has yet to reply to the charges against Wang, but it has previously accused Taipei of 'manipulating' the facts of the accident to cast Beijing in a bad light. Zhu Fenglian, spokesperson for China's Taiwan Affairs Office, previously described the subsea cable incident as a 'common maritime accident'. Wang declined to provide Taiwanese authorities with information about the ship's ownership, according to prosecutors, but the Hong Tai 58 is believed to be a so-called Chinese 'dark ship' acting unofficially on behalf of Beijing. 'Dark ships' have earned their name due to the practice of broadcasting multiple or false identities to maritime authorities. Sometimes the vessels may turn off identification signals to avoid detection, according to industry experts. Since 2023, there have been at least 11 cases of subsea cable breakdowns around Taiwan, although some were later ruled as accidents or due to the old age of the equipment. Subsea cables are the backbone of the internet and global telecoms industry, but they are also susceptible to breakdowns from movements on the sea floor or human activity. Between 100 and 200 cable breakdowns occur each year, according to industry data, and proving damage as deliberate is notoriously difficult and a challenge for governments beyond Taipei. Countries around the Baltic Sea have also seen an uptick in subsea cable breakdowns since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and they have also struggled to bring legal cases against Chinese and Russia-linked ships and their owners.
Al Jazeera
10-03-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
As undersea cables break off Europe and Taiwan, proving sabotage is hard
Taipei, Taiwan – When Taiwan seized a Chinese-crewed cargo ship suspected of deliberately severing one of its undersea telecom cables last month, authorities pledged to 'make every effort to clarify the truth' of what happened. Taiwan's Coast Guard Administration said it could not rule out the possibility that China had deployed the Togo-flagged Hong Tai 58 as part of a 'grey area intrusion'. Recent cases of damage to submarine cables around the island and in Europe suggest that proving sabotage, much less holding anyone accountable, may be no easy task. Since 2023, there have been at least 11 cases of undersea cable damage around Taiwan and at least 11 such incidents in the Baltic Sea, according to Taiwanese and European authorities. Taiwanese and European authorities have identified China or Russia – allies that share increasingly strained relations with the West and its partners – as the likely culprits in a number of incidents, though they have attributed several others to natural causes. In January, NATO launched Baltic Sentry to step up surveillance of suspicious activities by ships in the Baltic Sea. But so far, authorities have not announced specific retaliatory measures against Beijing or Moscow, though the European Commission has unveiled a roadmap calling for the enforcement of sanctions and diplomatic measures against unnamed 'hostile actors and the 'shadow fleet''. Authorities have also yet to criminally charge any individuals or companies despite detaining a number of vessels and crew, including the Hong Tai 58, which was seized near Taiwan's outlying islands on February 25. Beijing and Moscow have denied any involvement in sabotaging undersea cables. 'This is what the entire grey zone is about. It's about being deniable,' Ray Powell, the director of Stanford's Sea Light project, which monitors Chinese maritime activity, told Al Jazeera. 'You just have to be just deniable enough so that even though everybody knows it's you, they can't prove it's you.' Subsea cables – which crisscross the globe carrying 99 percent of intercontinental digital communications traffic – regularly suffer damage due to age, environmental changes and marine activities like fishing. Cable faults are so common – numbering between 100 and 200 each year, according to telecommunications data provider TeleGeography – that industry practice is to build subsea networks with built-in redundancies to ensure ongoing connectivity if one cable breaks down. These characteristics also make subsea cables a prime target for 'hybrid warfare' or 'grey zone activities' – low-grade coercive acts that are often opaque and conducive to plausible deniability – according to security analysts. 'Most cable breaks are the result of accidents… anchors may be unintentionally dropped in rough seas or left out for longer than intended. Cables may also break when fishing nets are dragged in the wrong location. What's more, a ship may not realise it has broken a cable,' Kevin Frazier, a Tarbell fellow at the nonprofit Lawfare, told Al Jazeera. 'The simplest way for a bad actor to break a cable is to make it look like one of the accidents that commonly cause such breaks. Anchors being dragged across a cable is one such cause.' Barbara Keleman, an associate director at London and Singapore-based intelligence firm Dragonfly, said that the spate of recent cable breakdowns featured tell-tale signs of sabotage despite the relatively large number of failures each year in non-suspicious circumstances. 'If you just look at the data, like how often these incidents are now occurring and how many cables are suddenly damaged at the same time, and you include into that the proximity of some of those ships near those cables, you have statistical deviation which suggests that there is something else going on,' Keleman told Al Jazeera. The incident involving the Hong Tai 58 came just weeks after Taiwanese authorities briefly detained the Cameroon-flagged Shun Xing 39 on suspicion of dragging its anchor over a section of the Trans-Pacific Express cable, which connects Taiwan with the United States West Coast. Coastguard officials said they were unable to board the vessel due to bad weather and the vessel sailed on to South Korea. Industry publication Lloyd's List said the Chinese freighter turned its automatic identification system (AIS) on and off and broadcast as many as three separate identities. Enforcing the law at sea is notoriously difficult for not only practical reasons but legal ones as well, including conflicting claims of jurisdiction. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, ships sailing in international waters are generally subject to the legal jurisdiction of the country under whose flag they are registered. Within a state's territorial waters, defined as 12 nautical miles (22km) from shore, vessels are subject to the jurisdiction of that country. Authorities can, however, exercise 'universal jurisdiction' over a ship outside of their territorial waters in a limited number of circumstances, including cases of piracy, 'terrorism' and slavery. Some countries also assert jurisdiction in international waters in cases where a citizen is a victim or perpetrator of a crime. Even in cases where authorities may have jurisdiction and evidence, it can be hard to make a legal case for deliberate sabotage, said Dragonfly's Keleman. 'If the investigators or the country's intelligence services can get a hold of a communication that clearly shows a command for the ship captain to do this, they might have an argument and can try to prosecute,' she said. 'I suspect that's going to be quite difficult.' The European authorities' investigation of the Chinese-flagged Yi Peng 3 following the severing of two subsea telecom cables in November underscored the challenges of responding to acts of suspected sabotage. AIS data showed the Yi Peng 3 slowing near the two cables – which connected Finland with Germany, and Sweden with Lithuania – around the time of their severing. Sonar images of the nearby seafloor showed evidence that the vessel had dragged its anchor for as far as 160km (99 miles). Despite the evidence, European investigators soon hit a diplomatic wall because the ship was flying under the flag of China and was anchored in international waters. Beijing announced it would investigate the incident itself, though it allowed representatives from Germany, Sweden, Finland and Denmark to board the vessel as 'observers'. In late December, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the Yi Peng 3's owner had decided to resume its voyage in consideration of the crew's physical and mental health and following a 'comprehensive assessment and consultation' with European authorities. China's Maritime Safety Administration and its embassy in Stockholm did not respond to Al Jazeera's requests for comment. Sweden's Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard at the time criticised Beijing for not allowing investigators on board to carry out a preliminary investigation. 'Our request that Swedish prosecutors, together with the police and others, be allowed to take certain investigative measures within the framework of the investigation on board remains. We have been clear with China on this,' Stenergard said. But even if European investigators were dissatisfied, there was not much else that could be done short of causing an international incident, said Jens Wenzel, a Danish defence analyst at Nordic Defence Analysis. 'In international waters, it is quite difficult without the consent of the master, owner/operator or flag state. Within territorial waters the jurisdiction of the coastal state kicks in, which allows for inspection if there is any suspicion of illegal activity,' Wenzel told Al Jazeera. 'In the case of Yi Peng 3, she anchored exactly outside Danish [territorial waters], giving both coastal states Denmark and Sweden difficulties using force to go onboard and without the adequate legislation in place.' In the months since the Yi Peng 3 left Europe, incidents of cable damage in the Baltic Sea have continued even as NATO has pledged to step up its defence of the region. They include a December 25 incident involving the Eagle S, a suspected Russian oil tanker flying the flag of the Cook Islands. The ship dragged its anchor 100km (62 miles), damaging subsea cables in the Gulf of Finland, according to Finnish authorities. Unlike other cases, Finnish authorities steered the ship into their territorial waters and impounded it. Three crew members are currently under a travel ban and a criminal investigation is ongoing, although the Eagle S itself was allowed to depart Finland last month. Herman Ljungberg, a Finnish lawyer representing the owners of the Eagle S, told Al Jazeera that the accusations are 'nonsense', and said that Finnish police had 'searched the vessel in and out for nine weeks and found nothing.' With US President Donald Trump pushing to end Russia's war in Ukraine, Finland's intelligence service warned last week that the end of the conflict would free up resources for Russia and its proxies to carry out acts of sabotage. 'The use of proxy operators by various states has recently become a more prominent aspect of both the intelligence and broader influencing scenario. Sabotage operations in Europe linked to the Russian military intelligence service GRU are one example of this,' the Finnish Security and Intelligence Service said in a statement. 'By using intermediaries, Russia seeks to cover its tracks. Russian sabotage operations aim to influence public opinion and the sense of public safety, and to overwhelm the authorities in target countries.' Russia's embassy in Stockholm did not respond to a request for comment. Sea Light's Powell said acts of sabotage against subsea cables are likely to continue. 'It appears that this is something of a recent trend, and China and Russia and others will do this because they will essentially calculate that the response will not be bad enough,' he said. 'The question then comes down to, how does the international community respond? How does Taiwan respond? What has happened to China or Russia that has yet to send the message that this is so intolerable that it's not worth doing again?'
