Source: El Diario Montanes
During the meeting held last week between the Spanish Minister of Defense, Carmen Chacón and representatives of the two Spanish tuna purse seiner owners (OPAGAG and and ANABAC-OPTUC), they proposed installing hermetically sealed rooms to protect the crew of the Spanish tuna vessels fishing in the Indian Ocean, in case of an attempted hijacking by Somali pirates.
The proposal is to build ‘panic rooms’ that will be connected with Atalanta forces, which fight against piracy in the Indian Ocean. The protocol would be that once the vessel crew has alerted about the attack, they enter the armored rooms, the military could then intervene, overpowering the pirates and freeing the kidnapped fishermen.
Until now, the boatowners have been granted approval by the Spanish Ministry of Defense to launch the self-protection project and “although it is impossible to guarantee total safety, the construction of hermetically sealed rooms would abort a potential pirate attack which private security could not do,†said Mrs. Chacon.
The Minister of Defense also indicated that the legislative changes to enable fishermen to incorporate private security forces onto their boats and to enable those agents to use military weapons were approved a little under a year ago. These preventive measures imposed against pirate attacks have been successful so far, and early warning systems that connect tuna vessels with the Atalanta controls have been effective.
So far, the Spanish fleets have invested 1 million euro in security: half of which is paid by the boatowners and the rest is covered by the government.
There are currently 30 tuna vessels fishing in the Indian Ocean, 13 of which carry the Spanish flag and all have private security.