Japan Frees Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior As G8 EndsOKINAWA, Japan - The environmental group Greenpeace said on Sunday the Japanese coast guard had released their flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, just as a summit of world leaders ended on this southern Japanese island.
Four members of the group arrested on Friday when they tried to sail their dinghy protest to the beach resort where Group of Eight leaders were holding a three-day summit were expected to appear before prosecutors during the day and to be released on Monday, Greenpeace said.
``The ship was released at noon today,'' said Ayako Sekine, a Greenpeace Japan official. ``So we are now free.''
The vessel was impounded late on Friday by Japanese coast guard officers, who chained the Rainbow Warrior to one of their boats in the port of Naha, capital of Okinawa island.
The chains were removed just as the G8 leaders concluded their annual summit at midday.
The coast guard had said they impounded the boat because Greenpeace had broken the law once and had threatened to do so again.
Sekine said Rainbow Warrior was likely to remain in Naha until Tuesday to clear up legal procedures, such as recovering items confiscated by police in a three-hour search on Saturday.
On Friday, the Rainbow Warrior had defied a one-nautical-mile ban on boats approaching the venue of the summit of leaders of the United States, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, Britain, Canada and Russia at a resort on a remote Okinawan peninsula.
The group was protesting against logging practices by G8 nations.
Preventive Measures, Heavy Security
The coast guard said they impounded the boat as a preventive measure.
Sekine welcomed the Rainbow Warrior's release but said police were heavy-handed in their efforts to ensure summit security.
``While we on the ship were not actually arrested, the fact that we were not granted shore passes until this afternoon means we were under de-facto house arrest,'' she said.
``We were carrying out a peaceful protest and the nautical-mile ban was really more of a request,'' she said. ''Impounding the ship was an injustice.''
Security was tight for the summit, with some 22,000 police on hand, eight navy gunboats cruising in Okinawa waters and a special underwater unit of divers patrolling undersea.
The one nautical mile exclusion zone was slapped into place for the duration of the summit.
Greenpeace activists have been arrested twice before in Japan, most recently in May. Each time they were detained for 11 days.