Ghost boat with two human heads on board washes ashore on Sado Island
A modern mystery: how did five human corpses and two severed human heads come to be on a boat shipwrecked on Japan’s Sado Island? The boat’s name has not be confirmed, but there are Korean letters on the side.
How long the boat had been at sea is hard to say, but the corpses are “partially skeletonised”.
Were the bodies eaten, perhaps, by a North Korean crew seeking refuge in Japan or South Korea?
The BBC speculates the the boat is a fishing vessel and the crew were forced by the country’s oppressive regime and a desperate need for food to fish too far from shore.
Boats are made from wood. They have no GPS technology. In November 2017, eight men were found alive on a boat at Yurihonjo marina, Japan. They claimed to be fishermen from North Korea who had gotten into trouble at sea. They are all sent back to North Korea.
In 2016, North Korea sold the fishing rights in some of its territorial waters to China. Japanese media reported in September 2019:
But with Chinese ships now operating along the coast, North Korean fishers are forced to risk venturing farther out, often in foreign waters.
Since September, Russia has apprehended more than 800 North Koreans fishing within its exclusive economic zone. A ship and motorboat seizure late that month turned up about 30,000 illegally caught squid, according to Russian media. In another incident, Russian border guards were injured as crew members of a detained vessel resisted arrest. South Korea has seen a surge since this summer in North Korean fishing operations near the Northern Limit Line, the disputed maritime boundary between the two Koreas. The number of illegal crossings swelled from 51 in all of 2018 to more than 400 so far this year, data from the South Korean military shows.
Can fishing trigger a war?
Posted: 28th, December 2019 | In: Strange But True Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
