Iceland seizes Paul Watson Foundation's anti-whaling ship and detains its crew

LONDON (AP) — Icelandic coast guards and special forces seized a ship operated by a group founded by anti-whaling activist Paul Watson and detained its crew, officials in the Arctic island nation said Saturday.

The Icelandic Coast Guard said the crew of whaling ship Hvalur 9 requested assistance on Thursday evening because they believed their safety was under threat from the protest vessel Bandero . It said the Bandero ignored coast guards’ instructions to leave Icelandic waters, and later an order to stop its engines.

Coast guards and the police special forces Viking Squad boarded the vessel around midnight on Thursday and detained its crew. Watson was not aboard.

The Captain Paul Watson Foundation confirmed in a statement that the vessel had been seized. It said the 21 crew members were being detained aboard the ship without their phones.

The ship arrived Friday in Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, and police have taken over the investigation, the coast guard agency said. Icelandic national broadcaster RUV reported that police will seek to deport the crew and ban them from returning to Iceland.

Along with Norway and Japan, Iceland is one of the only countries still practicing commercial whaling .

The country sets annual quotas for the fin whales and minke whales fishermen are allowed to hunt in its waters. It exports most of its whale meat to Japan, but demand there has dwindled since Japan left the IWC and resumed commercial whaling in 2019.

The hunt is increasingly contentious in Iceland, where whale meat is now rarely eaten.

Canada-born Watson, 75, is a former head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, whose high seas confrontations with whaling vessels have drawn support from celebrities, featured in the reality television series “Whale Wars” and regularly landed him in jail. He left Sea Shepherd in 2022 to set up his foundation.

Watson was imprisoned in Greenland for five months in 2024 after being arrested on a Japanese warrant over charges of obstructing a whaling ship in 2010. On his release in December 2024, Watson said he would be careful not to be caught again.

“I have to make sure that I don’t land in Iceland or another country where Interpol might try to have me arrested again,” he said

In 2012, Watson was made the subject of a “red notice” by the international police organization Interpol. He was removed from the most-wanted list in 2025.

His hard-line tactics have split the movement he started, and marine firms have accused the anti-whaling activists of endangering vessels and lives.

Earlier this year, the Bandero collided with an industrial krill trawler in Antarctica in what the ship’s Norwegian owner said was a deliberate attack that endangered its crew and could have caused an environmental disaster.