Mainland Chinese captain gets 26-year jail term over killings at sea

Chinese captain gets 26-year jail term over killings at sea
01/29/2021 https://focustaiwan.tw/society/202101290023

Taipei, Jan. 29 (CNA) The Kaohsiung District Court on Friday sentenced a Chinese national to 26 years imprisonment after he was found guilty of ordering the killing of four pirates at sea in 2012 while serving as the captain of a Taiwanese fishing vessel.

Wang Fengyu (汪峰裕), 43, was convicted of homicide and for violations of the Controlling Guns, Ammunition and Knives Act, the court said.

The incident took place on board the Kaohsiung-registered longliner Ping Shin No. 101 (屏新101號) when it was operating in the Indian Ocean off the Somali coast on Sept. 29, 2012.

Wang asked two Pakistani mercenaries he hired as the acting captain of the Ping Shin to fire at and kill four suspected Somali pirates that day, the court said.

Wang, a Zhejiang-native, was hired by a Kaohsiung company to serve as acting captain of the Taiwanese fishing vessel in 2011.

Prosecutors did not name the Taiwanese company or its owner, and the court's sentencing documents also did not provide such information.

However, CNA and other Taiwanese media have learned the company that hired the captain is Ping Shin Fishery Co., Ltd.

International maritime safety groups and Greenpeace had long suspected the boat in question to be the Taiwan-registered Ping Shin and had urged the Taiwanese government to question its owner and solve the murder mystery.

Prosecutors, however, had said their investigations were complicated by the fact that the crew was not in Taiwan.

One of the boats that was operating in close enough proximity to witness the shooting, however, was also a Taiwanese registered vessel.

According to the court, on Sept. 29, 2012, the Ping Shin was operating in the Indian Ocean about 595 kilometers southeast of the Somali capital of Mogadishu when it, along with the Kaohsiung-registered Chun I No. 217 (春億217號) and two other unidentified fishing boats, were fired on by a pirate ship with four pirates.

After the ships were fired on, one of them decided to ram into the pirate ship, which caused it to overturn and sent the four pirates into the ocean.

Despite knowing the pirates had no way to fight back, Wang instructed the two mercenaries to shoot and kill the four men in the water.

The killings only became known to the public two years later when a 10-minute video clip of the fatal shootings was circulated on the internet in August 2014, after the phone used to film the murders was found in a taxi in Fiji. After the phone was found, an anonymous person, perhaps the founder, discovered the video and posted it on YouTube.

In the video, a man believed to be the captain is heard giving directions in Mandarin with a mainland Chinese accent over a loudspeaker to the crew as 40 rounds of live ammunition are fired.

The four unarmed men in the water are shot to death one by one, with the video showing the water turning red around them. No images of the shooters are seen.

Prosecutors say they spent time trying to track down the vessel, but the captain never reported for questioning, so a warrant for his arrest was issued on Dec. 28, 2018.

It's unclear why they waited till 2018 to issue a warrant for his arrest when maritime safety groups had long suspected the boat was involved and had linked it to the fishing company.

In 2016, Greenpeace highlighted the case in its report on human and labor rights abuses in Taiwan's fishing industry.

Wang was arrested on Aug. 22, 2020 after the ship he was in charge of, the Seychelles-flagged Indian Star, docked at Kaohsiung port. He has been in custody ever since.

He was subsequently indicted by Kaohsiung prosecutors following an end to their investigation last October.

Although Wang is a Chinese national and the crime occurred in the Indian Ocean, Taiwanese prosecutors are able to prosecute him because the shootings originated on a Taiwanese vessel.

On Friday, the district court ruled that the killing of the unarmed men showed that he clearly had no respect for human life.

The ruling can be appealed.

(By Hung Hsueh-kuang and Ko Lin)