Tokyo - Greenpeace Japan filed a complaint with prosecutors Thursday against whaling ship crew members who pilfer whale meat after so-called research hunting, Japanese media reports said. The environmental group found that 12 crew members of the whaling ship Nisshin Maru sent a total of 1 ton of prime whale meat, worth about 15 million yen (142,000 dollars), to their homes and other places after they ended their scientific research mission in the Antarctic Ocean.
Greenpeace Japan told Japan's NHK public television on Thursday that it was "a big problem that embezzlement had been committed in the scientific research whaling funded by tax-payers' money."
A Fisheries Agency official said crew members had been allowed to take home less than 10 kilogrammes of meat each after the trip and "it would be impossible to embezzle a few hundred kilogrammes in a chunk."
The agency has instructed Kyodo Senpaku, a private company which dispatched the ship and its crew members for the mission, to probe the allegation and is waiting for results.
Japan halted commercial whaling in line with an international moratorium in 1986 but has been hunting whales since 1987 for what it describes as scientific research purposes. Anti-whaling groups brand this as a cover for commercial whaling.
