Canadian activist among those detained on anti-whaling ship in Iceland

An animal-rights activist from Saskatchewan is among those detained off the coast of Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, on a ship operated by a group founded by anti-whaling activist Paul Watson. 

The Icelandic Coast Guard boarded the protest vessel Bandero on Thursday and detained its crew. Crew members are now in limbo, said Shannon Mann, a Canadian, who is on board. 

“We’re told we’re not (under arrest), but we’re also told we can’t leave the vessel. So we’re not allowed to set foot on shore, but we can’t leave Iceland,” she said.

Icelandic national broadcaster RUV reported that police will seek to deport the crew and ban them from returning to Iceland.

The Icelandic Coast Guard said the seizure of the vessel came after the crew of whaling ship Hvalur 9 requested assistance on Thursday evening because they believed their safety was under threat. It said the Bandero ignored coast guards’ instructions to leave Icelandic waters, and later an order to stop its engines.

Coast guards and the police special forces Viking Squad boarded the vessel around midnight on Thursday and detained its crew. Watson was not aboard.

“They rounded up all the crew, put us in one room, and then overtook the vessel and drove the vessel back to port,” said Mann.

The Captain Paul Watson Foundation confirmed in a statement that the vessel had been seized and said the 21 crew members were being detained aboard the ship without their phones. The foundation also claimed the crew were denied access to their lawyer and that police refused to show them a warrant to search the ship and seize some of their property. 

On Friday, law enforcement interviewed members of the crew and asked them to sign legal documents in Icelandic, Mann said. She said they have not been told why they are being detained.

“We were told that we aren’t arrested but we aren’t allowed to leave the vessel for up to four weeks,” she said.

Mann started volunteering at the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in 2006. Now living in Calgary, she was in Iceland as a deckhand on Bandero as part of the Captain Paul Watson Foundation’s Operation 86, which aims to end the practice of whaling in the Arctic island nation.

Along with Norway and Japan, Iceland is one of the only countries still practising commercial whaling. The hunt is increasingly contentious in Iceland, where whale meat is now rarely eaten.

This practice taints the country’s reputation, believes Mann. 

“It’s a beautiful country with a lot of beautiful people, and right now it’s being known for whaling,” she said.

Canada-born Watson, 75, is a former head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, whose high seas confrontations with whaling vessels have drawn support from celebrities, been featured in the reality television series “Whale Wars” and regularly landed him in jail. He left Sea Shepherd in 2022 to set up his foundation.

Watson was imprisoned in Greenland for five months in 2024 after being arrested on a Japanese warrant over charges of obstructing a whaling ship in 2010. In 2012, Watson was made the subject of a “red notice” by the international police organization Interpol. He was removed from the most-wanted list in 2025.

His hard-line tactics have split the movement he started, and marine firms have accused the anti-whaling activists of endangering vessels and lives.

Earlier this year, the Bandero collided with an industrial krill trawler in Antarctica in what the ship’s Norwegian owner said was a deliberate attack that endangered its crew and could have caused an environmental disaster.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 1, 2026.

— With files from The Associated Press

By Marieke Glorieux-Stryckman | Copyright 2026, The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.