By DPA
Sydney : Two anti-whaling activists taken hostage by Japanese whalers in Antarctica earlier this week have been freed and are back aboard the Steve Irwin protest ship.
“They tried to throw me overboard,” Australia’s Benjamin Potts said Friday. “I held on to one of the rails and they knocked my hands off that, and then I put my foot up against one of the other rails and kicked off and they weren’t able to throw me over.”
He said he was ready to risk his life again to try and stop whales from being killed.
Potts, 28, was speaking to a Melbourne radio station after he and 35-year-old British national Giles Lane were ferried from the Japanese harpoon ship by the Oceanic Viking, a customs vessel that the Australian government sent to monitor Japanese whaling.
The protest pair from the US-based Sea Shepherd organisation had been detained since they grappled aboard the Japanese harpoon vessel Tuesday.
A stalemate had developed with the Japanese refusing to release them until Sea Shepherd agreed to stop harassing the whaling fleet.
The Australian government broke the impasse with an offer to take the pair off the harpoon ship and transfer them to the Steve Irwin.
The Australian initiative allowed Potts and Lane to avoid a possible piracy charge when the vessel they were on reached Japan.
Glenn Inwood, spokesman for the Japanese organisation, told Radio New Zealand that the whaling fleet, which is on its annual hunt for nearly 1,000 whales for a so-called research programme, would now resume whaling.
The whaling season for the five-vessel Japanese fleet begins in December and runs through until March.
“It was certainly quite handy for the Japanese government that (Oceanic Viking) was there because it helped them resolve the situation with the two illegal intruders,” Inwood said.
“It became very clear yesterday after 24 hours of receiving no communication from the Sea Shepherd organisation that they had no intention of removing the men from the Japanese vessel and therefore the Australian government was asked to intervene and take them aboard their Customs vessel,” he said.