The Philippines says three fishermen were killed after their boat was rammed by a “foreign” ship in the South China Sea

CNN
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The Philippines is investigating the deaths of three Filipino fishermen after they were killed in a collision with a “foreign” ship in territorial waters. South China SeaAs announced by the authorities in the country, on Wednesday.

The Philippine fishing boat FFB Dearyn was struck at around 4:20 a.m. Monday near Scarborough Shoal, according to the Philippine Coast Guard citing a crew member.

The Coast Guard said 11 crew members survived the incident and used their service boats to reach land on Tuesday morning, transporting the dead – including the captain – to Pangasinan province in northern Luzon, the country’s largest island.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said the Coast Guard was “standing back and examining all surveillance vessels in the area as part of its ongoing investigation.”

Marcos said: “We assure the victims, their families and everyone that we will make every effort to hold those responsible for this unfortunate maritime accident accountable.”

He also asked all parties to “refrain from engaging in speculation” during the investigation.

In an update on Wednesday, the Coast Guard said it would contact an oil tanker registered under the Marshall Islands flag, which may have been in the area at the time of the accident, based on marine traffic data and survivor accounts.

According to information gathered by authorities, the tanker came from South Korea and was headed to Singapore, Admiral Armand Balilo told CNN affiliate CNN Philippines in a television interview.

Balilo said the oil tanker was in the area at the time of the collision and that authorities were still gathering evidence.

The South China Sea is a 1.3 million square mile waterway that is vital to international trade, with an estimated third of global shipping worth trillions of dollars passing through it each year. This means that huge container ships and oil tankers routinely sail through the region.

The sea is also home to vast fertile fishing grounds on which the lives and livelihoods of many people depend, often using much smaller vessels.

Up to 85% of all maritime accidents are the result of navigational hazards and poorly regulated business operations that continue to pose risks to shipping and undermine the security environment, said John Bradford, international affairs fellow in Indonesia at the Council on Foreign Relations.

He added that such incidents are particularly common in Southeast Asia, where ship crews are often subject to mistreatment and lack of training Information fusion center In Singapore, which counted 1,882 people killed or missing at sea in the first half of 2023.

“Sometimes, crashes, even those resulting in death, go unreported due to mistrust of authorities or fear of prosecution for crashes or other activities. This speaks to the overall governance problem,” Bradford said.

The South China Sea is also a major maritime flashpoint.

Bracketed by China Many Southeast Asian countries have multiple governments claiming parts of the sea, with Beijing asserting ownership over almost all of the waterway, in defiance of an international court ruling.

Over the past two decades, China has occupied a number of obscure reefs and atolls far from its coastline across the South China Sea, where it has built military facilities, including runways and ports.

Scarborough Shoal, known as Bajo de Masinloc in the Philippines and Huangyan Island in China, is a small but strategic reef and fishing spot located 130 miles (200 km) west of Luzon that has been a major source of tensions between Manila and Beijing.

Even if this incident does not directly involve China, regional disputes could have an indirect impact, said Richard Hedarian, senior lecturer in international relations at the Asia Center of the University of the Philippines.

“The truth is that China bears structural responsibility for what is happening due to Chinese bullying and various means of preventing Filipino fishermen from accessing traditional fishing grounds. What is happening here is that [Filipino fishermen are] “It is being pushed farther and farther out into the high seas,” Heydarian said.

China’s Foreign Ministry defended the behavior of its ships in the waterway and said Beijing would “vigorously protect” what it considers its territorial sovereignty.

The area has seen increasingly frequent confrontations between Filipino ships and small wooden fishing boats against larger Chinese coast guard vessels and what Manila says are mysterious Chinese maritime militia fishing vessels.

In 2016, an international tribunal in The Hague ruled in favor of the Philippines in a historic maritime dispute, concluding that China had no legal basis to claim historic rights over much of the South China Sea. Manila says Beijing ignored the ruling.