September 30, 2020 — In late July, a high-speed chase stirred the waters northeast of Indonesia’s Natuna Islands, as patrol officers pursued a Vietnamese vessel suspected of illegal fishing.
Having fled when authorities approached it for questioning, the Vietnamese crew tossed a fishing net to purge implicating evidence, burned tires to cloud their sight, and zigzagged across the water to evade capture, according to the Indonesian side’s account of the incident. Indonesian officers ordered the sailors to stop. Instead, they tried to ram into the patrol boat.
A visit, board, search and seizure team fired a warning shot into the air, but the Vietnamese attempted to escape. It was only after the team shot the fishing vessel’s platform that it slowed down and yielded to inspection, which uncovered two tons of fish.
The Indonesian Maritime Information Center (IMIC), launched days earlier, on July 22, had helped detect the Vietnamese boat by pooling high-quality surveillance data from several government bodies, according to Demo Putra from the Indonesian Coast Guard (Bakamla), which oversees this initiative.