Anti-whaling activist Paul Watson has been arrested in Greenland on an international arrest warrant issued by Japan, authorities and his foundation said.
Watson, star of reality TV show “War of the Whales,” was arrested when his boat docked in the Greenland capital Nuuk, a police statement said.
The Captain Paul Watson Foundation said the arrest was believed to be related to an Interpol Red Notice issued for Mr Watson’s previous anti-whaling interventions in the Antarctic region.
Police said the 73-year-old man will be taken to a district court and requested to be detained pending a decision on whether he may be extradited to Japan.
lens Published by his foundation on Footage showed police handcuffing Mr Watson on the John Paul DeJoria boat, putting him into a police car and driving him away.
His foundation said it was “completely shocked as the red notice disappeared months ago”.
“We were surprised because that could have meant it had been deleted or kept secret. We now understand that Japan kept it secret to lure Paul into a false sense of security,” Rocky McLean, the foundation’s director of ship operations, said in a statement. stated in a statement.
“We implore the Danish government to release Captain Watson and not to accept this politically motivated demand.”
Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark with self-governing government and its own parliament.
In 2012, Interpol issued a red notice for Mr Watson, saying he was wanted by Japan for causing damage and injury in two incidents targeting Japanese whaling ships in Antarctic waters in 2010.
The Japanese government has not yet commented, but a spokesman for Japan’s coast guard told AFP it was aware of the arrests.
Mr Watson’s foundation said he was on his way to “intercept the newly built Japanese factory ship Yasui Maru in the North Pacific.”
The ship set out from Japan in May to slaughter whales caught and killed by smaller boats.
Activists have targeted the Kangei Maru’s predecessor before 2019, when Japan hunted whales in the Antarctic and North Pacific for “scientific” purposes.
Japan withdrew from the International Whaling Commission in 2019 and now only conducts commercial whaling in its own waters and on a so-called sustainable scale.
However, Mr Watson’s foundation believes Japan plans to resume high seas whaling in the Southern Ocean and North Pacific as soon as next year.
The group said in a statement that the “reactivation” of the red notice against Mr Watson “is politically motivated and coincides with the launch of a new factory whale processing vessel”.
Mr. Watson has won supporters around the world for his decades of activism but has also been criticized for his aggressive tactics and faced legal problems.
Some of the criticism came from Greenpeace, of which Mr Watson claimed he was a co-founder, although Deny this.
