Getting away with murder on the high seas

The men are helpless in the open water, clinging to floating debris, tossed by the rolling waves. Several large fishing ships circle. None of the victims has a life jacket, but no-one makes a move to help. This isn’t a rescue.

A voice, off camera, shouts in Mandarin: “In the front, to the left! What are you doing?” Then: “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

Bullets spray the water around one flailing man. One round catches him. His body stills. Blood plumes in the blue ocean. Later, deckhands laugh and pose for photos.

Grainy video of the 2012 killings, which shows the slaughter of at least four men in the Indian Ocean, has been circulating in the darker corners of the internet for years. Now, authorities in Taiwan have arrested a suspect: a 43-year-old Chinese national whom they believe to be the man who shouted the orders to kill. Investigators hope he leads them to others.

But the case, which is still unfolding, shows the challenge of prosecuting crimes on the high seas. There were at least four tuna longliner ships on the scene of an incident that unfolded over more than 10 minutes in broad daylight. But no law required any of the dozens of witnesses to report the killings – and no-one did. Law enforcement in the open ocean is limited, and jurisdiction is complicated. Authorities learned of the killings only when the video turned up on a phone left in a taxi in Fiji in 2014.

It’s still unclear who the victims were, or why they were shot. An unknown number of similar killings takes place each year – deckhands on the ship from which the video was shot told a private investigator, and later a documentary crew on camera, that they’d witnessed a similar slaughter a week before.

Wang Feng Yu, believed to have been the captain of the Taiwanese-flagged Ping Shin 101 during the attack, was taken into custody by the Taiwanese coast guard in August after his current ship docked at Kaohsiung port. He’s being held while prosecutors investigate.

“Now that we have the captain, we have a more direct way of questioning him about the whole ordeal,” Tseng Ching-ya, spokeswoman for the Kaohsiung District Prosecutor’s Office, told the Central News Agency in Taiwan.

Hsu Hung-ju, the deputy chief prosecutor in Kaohsiung, told The Washington Post that such investigations normally take six to eight months. “It depends on the case,” he said. “But it won’t take too long.”

Hsu declined to say whether prosecutor Hsu Hung-pin had interviewed witnesses. Though he refused to provide a name, Hsu also said that Wang has a lawyer.