With the Fijian investigation closed, Copeland and other staffers at like-minded nonprofits knew that any further inquiry into the video would fall on them. For a few weeks after the video appeared on YouTube, the footage featured in some mainstream media reports and on fisheries forums, but after a while, attention drifted. “It was circulating for a while-really quite horrendously as a snuff video,” says Duncan Copeland, the executive director of TM-Tracking (TMT, formerly Trygg Mat Tracking), a Norway-based nonprofit, referring to a genre of video documenting actual murders that some people watch for entertainment.įijian authorities opened an investigation, but quickly determined that the incident had not occurred in their waters and did not involve Fijians. She’d hoped the footage could serve as a warning to Fijian fishermen about the risks they faced at sea. ” Her cousin, a police officer, had sent it to her wanting to protect him, the student had made up a story that she’d found the video in a taxi on a stranger’s cellphone. In August 2014, a university student in Fiji uploaded the footage to YouTube mislabeled as “Fishing vessel fijian crew gettin shot, out side fiji waters. Before long, the video was circulating among crew networks all over the Pacific. Months after the shooting, a Fijian fisherman boarded a boat in the port of Suva, Fiji, and saw a video of the events on a cook’s phone. Instead, like most crimes at sea, it would have gone unreported and unpunished, a product of the rampant impunity that exists across the world’s oceans-and, as the fates of those victims reveal, a place where it is entirely possible to get away with murder. Were it not for 10 minutes and 26 seconds of grainy footage uncovered two years later, in 2014, this violent attack and an earlier one that took the lives of as many as 38 fishermen in total would likely never have come to light. At that point, the longliner captain hands off steering to his first engineer and heads to the deck, grabbing a gun from a guard and shooting at the men in the ocean who are still alive, clinging to wreckage from the dhow. Pakistani security guards firing AK-47s and Kalashnikovs from one of the longliners pause when they hear the remaining victims crying out in Urdu, a language they understand: “We are not pirates,” say the fishers, presumably recognizing they’ve been taken for some of the Somali marauders responsible for more than 780 piracy attacks over the previous four years. The other two catch up, and all four longliners ram the wooden ship to splinters, throwing the man back in the water. He tries to flee, but two of the longliners block his path. One of the men in the water clambers back aboard the dhow and manages to restart the engine. The attacking ships jostle for position, and guards on a second ship take over shooting. With no chance to escape and a temperamental engine slowing them down, the 20 or so crew members from the dhow leap into the water as bullets begin to shower the ocean around them. Armed guards on each longliner appear on deck. On a clear September 2012 afternoon in the middle of the Indian Ocean, far from the coast of Somalia, the crew of a traditional Arab boat called a dhow is tending to their fishing nets when four much larger commercial longliners close in. Listen now, download, or subscribe to “Hakai Magazine Audio Edition” through your favorite podcast app. This article is also available in audio format. Stream or download audio For this article Octo| 7,900 words, about 40 minutes Share this article Illustration by Chad Lewis Murder at Sea When a grainy video of a grisly mass shooting on the high seas surfaced, one determined detective and a host of NGOs went on a quest for justice.
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