Paradise lost as Pacific becomes a smuggler’s dream
It was the piece of rope on the remote beach that first caught the young shark fisherman’s eye. It would only lead to trouble.
It was the piece of rope on the remote beach that first caught the young shark fisherman’s eye.
Baffled as to how the shiny cord had ended up on a tiny atoll hundreds of kilometres from civilisation, the Papua New Guinean decided to investigate further.
The rope led up onto the beach to a stick poking out of a pile of disturbed sand and ever curious the fisherman started digging. What he would unearth could only be described as trouble.
Buried in sand were 11 duffel bags containing more than $50 million worth of cocaine, believed destined for Australia.
The discovery near tiny Budi Budi Island about 350km east of the PNG mainland would lead to his small village being menaced by a boatload of heavily-tattooed Asian gangster types wanting their drugs back, a 400km sea chase involving the PNG navy, the idyllic palm fringed atolls around his home being flagged as a major new cocaine importation pipeline with links to Eastern Europe, and perhaps most worrying of all, the revelation that somewhere in the region a multimillion-dollar stash of drugs has now gone missing.
The full scale of the drama has remained little known outside of PNG but across the region the growing presence of major international drug smugglers and organised crime syndicates in the Pacific has been keeping law enforcement authorities awake at night.
Soft local laws for drug offences, poorly resourced police forces and the sheer isolation of island nations in the region have created a smugglers’ paradise.
Last week Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne announced Australia would be developing a $17 million intelligence centre to provide strategic analysis to regional partners, strengthen maritime information sharing and issue security alerts across the Pacific and to help respond to threats like drugs, people smuggling and illegal fishing.
For the 300 villagers who reside on Budi Budi in the Laughlan Islands group and rely only on a simple two-way radio to communicate with the outside world, the resources cannot come soon enough.
Their once unspoilt paradise which lies midway between the Solomon Islands and PNG in the Solomon Sea is directly in the path of an international crime wave driven by globalisation.
The first major hint of how bad the problem was getting, occurred about two years ago when a huge and sophisticated illegal sea cucumber harvesting gang descended on the pristine waters around their Islands.
When PNG authorities finally caught up with the raiders — a team of 50 Vietnamese fisherman — they found 77 barrels of sea cucumbers potentially worth millions of dollars if they made dinner tables in Hong Kong.
“A lot of illegal things have happened on that island, either coming from Australia down this way and into the Asian countries, or from there coming this way,” says police chief George Bayagau, whose Milne Bay district encompasses the region.
“We believe this has gone on a number of times. There’s hardly any communication. Services go there once in a while.
“It’s not only drugs, it’s illegal things like firearms and ammunition.”
The case of the cocaine on Budi Budi Island in May earlier this year provides the perfect case study of the issues facing those trying to stop the illegal activity.
Despite the eventual apprehension of the suspected traffickers — six Hong Kong nationals and one Montenegrin — it now appears PNG and Australian authorities have lost all track of the cocaine due to a lack of resources and the remoteness of the islands.
The shark fisherman told local villagers who took the 11 bags to their home but a group of tattooed Asian men soon showed up looking for the gear, say police.
Showing the villagers a bag similar to those recovered from the sand, the men, who did not speak English, made it clear they wanted their goods back.
Locals handed back all but one of the packages that had been in the duffel bags, police said. The Asian men appeared to smoke a sample of the contents to test the integrity.
The villagers became frightened when the Asian men’s faces started to turn red from using the drugs. They agreed to trade fruit from the island in exchange with mouldy rice from the Asians while at the same time they used their two-way radio to alert a local disaster centre on the mainland to the situation.
PNG Police alerted the navy, which dispatched a patrol boat to the island but by the time they arrived the Asians were long gone.
PNG authorities say Australia then provided aerial surveillance which helped them find the missing boat and the seven-man crew after a 400km sea chase.
When the PNG officials reached the vessel, which was drifting and out of fuel near Kiriwana Island, about 150km from the PNG mainland, there were more surprises than just the curious international combination of crew.
The vessel, a former prawn trawler, was a ghost boat with no registration or identification — stateless and with the transponder turned off. It was also modified with the booms removed and the sides built up, reinforced with spaces that authorities thought looked like loopholes for weapons to be used, according to PNG government maritime authority officer Bernard William.
When the police along with the PNG navy crew tried to search the vessel they found the hold appeared to have been booby-trapped. They managed to find a tiny quantity of cocaine above decks but nothing else.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Mr William a former PNG navy patrol boat captain.
“They couldn’t search the boat because they had contaminated the engine room (with fuel and oil). It was so toxic we couldn’t enter.”
The Navy tried to tow the boat but it was too heavy and had to be left drifting while the patrol boat returned to port at Alotau with the crew.
Mr William said the government then ordered a tug from Alotau to try and recover the boat.
But by the time the tug tracked down the vessel it had drifted hundreds of kilometres north into the waters around the Siassi Islands, an area so unsettled that the only outside visitors are usually dinosaur hunters searching for a mysterious pterodactyl-like creature the locals call the Ropen or flying devil, which some have suggested is the last living dinosaur.
When the vessel was found it had run aground near Umboi island in the archipelago and the tug was unable to shift it.
This week Mr Bayagau said the vessel was still sitting on reef unable to be moved and could still have the drugs on board as it had not been searched due to the condition of the hold.
But he said it could also be the case that the drugs were offloaded somewhere between when the crew left Budi Budi Island and when they were intercepted later by the patrol boat.
“It is believed this boat has met up with one or two more boats while on its way. We believe a change took place,” he said.
He does not know where the cocaine has ended up and Australian authorities appear equally baffled.
Asked this week about the concerning scenario of so much cocaine going missing, the Australian Federal Police declined to comment arguing the matter was part of an “ongoing RPNGC operational matter, it would not be appropriate to comment”.
Meanwhile the seven man crew of the boat are due to face trial this week in the local court in Alotau on charges relating to the quantity of cocaine retained by the Budi Budi villagers and the amount found above decks on the boat.
If convicted the men will likely face a lenient sentence, says Mr Bayagau.
“PNG laws on drugs are really outdated. There’s no deterrent here.”
Since February 2016 more than 7.5 tonnes of cocaine destined for Australia has been seized “while transiting the South Pacific via small craft or once it has arrived ashore” say the Australian Federal Police.
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