'If I get sent to Japan, I'm not coming home'

Anti-whaler Paul Watson, who left Greenpeace to found Sea Shepherd, spent his 74th birthday in prison and faces an extradition threat

- Daniel Boffey

The humpback whales watched by Paul Watson from his prison cell this summer have long since migrated from the iceberg-flecked Nuup Kangerlua fjord to warmer seas.

It is over four months since Watson an eco-terrorist to some and a brave environmentalist to others - was brought here to Anstalten, a highsecurity jail perched on the frozen coast of south-east Greenland after being arrested while refuelling his ship, MV John Paul DeJoria, in nearby Nuuk, the capital of the autonomous Danish territory.

He had been on his way with a 32-strong crew to practise his decadeslong policy of "non-violent aggression" by intercepting a new Japanese whaling "mothership", the ¥7.5bn ($47m) Kangei Maru. But shortly after tying up his vessel in the harbour "a nice police car turned up" and 12 armed officers boarded.

It was to prove the opening of just the latest, but perhaps the most dramatic, chapter yet in the story of Watson's running battles on the high seas with the whalers of Japan. The Japanese government initially used a "research" loophole to circumvent a 1986 International Whaling Commission moratorium on hunts in international waters and then withdrew from the IWC entirely in order to continue commercial hunting within its own exclusive economic zone. Now it is said to retain a desire to expand again.

"I was sitting in the captain's chair at the time, and one of them just walked up, grabbed me by the shirt, pulled me off the chair and turned me around and handcuffed me," Watson said of his arrest in Nuuk harbour. "And I said: 'What's this for?' And they said: 'You'll find out' and took me down to the police station. They weren't a very friendly bunch."