The streets of Singapore are hot, clean and full of life. There are hundreds of ships in the harbour waiting to unload their containers. The shipping traffic is overwhelming and chaotic, but so non-bureaucratic that Singapore is constantly cited as one of the simplest places in the world to do business. The pirate fleet’s silent service providers are also hiding in the midst of this commercial whirlwind. Here they procure provisions, spare parts and fuel. Here they also find their ship agents.
In their explanations after the wreck of the Thunder, the officers stated that it was the Singapore company Thong Aik Marine Enterprises that represented the owner of the ship. Some also implied that the company owned the Thunder.
“No, no, no. We are not the owner of this vessel. If we were, we would not have been sitting here right now,” a harassed representative for the company shouts into the telephone.
Then he hangs up.
47
THE LAST VIKING
INDONESIA, MARCH 2016
It is the crew of a merchant vessel who discovers the Viking first. The easily recognizable, blue-painted pirate lowers anchor north of Bintan Island in Indonesia. The discovery quickly becomes an intelligence report that is sent to the Indonesian Navy. A short time later a military helicopter is airborne and soon confirmation arrives that it is the world-famous fishing vessel that is now in Indonesian waters.
The first pirate on which a wanted notice was issued is the last to be apprehended.
The worn out and disillusioned crew of the Viking have sailed straight into Indonesia’s war against illegal fishing. While other nations hand out fines and prison sentences, Indonesia brings out the big guns. By the time the Viking is forced in to port at a naval base in Bintan by a battleship, the Indonesian authorities have sunk 170 foreign fishing vessels in less than two years.
“It’s simpler for us now,” explains Rear Admiral Achmad Taufiqoerrachman, who led the operation against the Viking.1
“Before we sometimes found ten ships fishing that were functioning on a single fisheries permit, but because there was so much double-dealing on the part of the companies that owned the vessels, we never succeeded in proving which nine were fishing illegally. Now we just say: This is illegal,” he says when we meet him in Jakarta a few days after the Viking has been apprehended.
And the new shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy works, according to the rear admiral.
“The number of illegal vessels in our waters has been drastically reduced.”
Indonesia is the country in the world hardest hit by illegal fishing. The authorities estimate that there are 5,000 illegal fishing vessels lurking in the island nation’s waters at any given moment. The country loses at least 5 billion dollars annually on the looting, according to the authorities.
That is why combating the fishing pirates is one of the main tasks of Rear Admiral Taufiqoerrachman and the Indonesian Navy. It is also the reason why Indonesia has a special elite group investigating illegal fishing, a group that reports directly to the president.
For Indonesia the fight against pirate fishing is deadly serious and the Viking is actually irrelevant.
“I informed the Minister of Fisheries that we had found the Viking. ‘Oh yeah! Blow it up today,’ she said. I explained that the ship was wanted by Interpol and that we should wait until they come to Indonesia so we can carry out a joint investigation,” Taufiqoerrachman says.
The Indonesian investigators and the Interpol team from Norway who go on board the Viking a few days later find that the officers have cleaned up well. There is not a document to be found from later than 2013 and outdated and destroyed electronics equipment fills the shelves on the bridge. It is not surprising. Five months earlier, armed Australian agents boarded the ship in the Indian Ocean. The officers on the Viking have had plenty of time to dump evidence into the ocean.
There is little information on the bridge that can incriminate the owner, but the investigators make finds that tell them about life on board the Viking. They discover several well-stocked medicine cabinets containing antibiotics still within their expiration date, tools to perform simple surgery, a little perused edition of Don Quixote and dozens of flags – the most well-worn is North Korea’s red, white and blue.
They also find documentation that sheds light on the Viking’s odd relation with war-torn Libya –and with the abandoned pirate ship that Peter Hammarstedt found in Cape Verde.
When in 2013 Norway requested that Interpol issue a notice on the Viking, the ship was named the Snake and was allegedly flagged in the North African country. There the owner had procured a ship’s certificate that was incompetently translated into Arabic and stamped with the coat of arms of Libya’s former King Idris, who ruled until 1969. It was obviously a forgery.
When the Interpol team ransacks the Viking in Indonesia, they find a stamp on board containing a spelling mistake: the word “Discrict”, not “District”. A stamp with the identical spelling mistake was also found on board the abandoned pirate ship in Cape Verde. And that isn’t the only connection between the two ships. Both have a relation to a dead ruler from Libya.
On board the pirate vessel in Cape Verde the investigators found an IMO number which had previously belonged to a tuna fishing vessel owned by one of the sons of Libya’s deceased dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi, a vessel that was sunk during the NATO bombing of the country.
“There was somebody who knew that the Gaddafi vessel had disappeared in the chaos in Libya. And they took advantage
