The Sri Lanka Navy has seized an Indian fishing trawler that crossed into Sri Lankan territorial waters and was fishing illegally off the northern coast, the service said on Saturday.
The vessel was taken into custody during a special operation in the seas south of Delft Island on Saturday afternoon, Hiru News reported. The Navy said the trawler was fishing inside Sri Lankan waters in violation of the International Maritime Boundary Line.
The seized trawler and the fishermen aboard are to be handed over to the relevant authorities for legal action.
Where this happened
Delft Island, known in Tamil as Neduntheevu, lies in the Palk Strait off the Jaffna peninsula and is the westernmost inhabited island in the chain running towards the Indian coast. The waters around it are among the narrowest stretches between the two countries, and they are the single most common location for these interceptions.
Cases are normally handed to the Fisheries Inspector for the area, and the crew are produced before a magistrate’s court before any repatriation is arranged. Foreign vessels fishing inside Sri Lanka’s exclusive economic zone without a permit are prohibited under the Fisheries and Aquatic Resources Act.
A recurring dispute
Interceptions of this kind are frequent rather than exceptional, and they sit inside a long-running bilateral dispute. Tamil Nadu trawler fleets cross the maritime boundary in search of better catch, and Sri Lankan fishermen in the north — whose own grounds were closed for much of the civil war — have pressed Colombo for tougher enforcement, particularly against bottom trawling, which is illegal in Sri Lanka.
The Navy detained ten Indian fishermen and seized their trawler in northern waters in April, and the issue has surfaced repeatedly at political level on both sides. In August, Tamil Nadu’s fisheries minister took the detention of state fishermen to Delhi, while in Jaffna the Communist Party called for stronger action against Indian trawlers operating in Sri Lankan waters.
Not reported
Hiru’s account does not state how many fishermen were on board — a figure that varies widely between incidents — and does not name the vessel, give the time of the operation, identify the naval unit involved, or say which authority the crew and boat were handed to. It does not record whether the trawler was engaged in bottom trawling, and no Navy spokesperson is quoted by name.
Because near-identical reports of Delft Island seizures appear several times a year with crew numbers ranging from nine to eleven, no crew figure from earlier incidents has been carried into this report. No other verified newsroom had filed on Saturday’s seizure at the time of writing.
