An anti-whaling group banned one of its replica watches members for carrying a weapon onboard ship as a strategy to help him avoid jail in Japan, & he is free to rejoin its protests, the group's leader said Thursday.A Tokyo court on Wednesday convicted New Zealander Pete Bethune of assault & obstructing Japanese whaling ships in the Antarctic Ocean earlier this year, but suspended the two-year jail sentence.
Bethune, 45, climbed onto the whaling ship Shonan Maru 2 in February from a Jet Ski to confront its captain over a collision the earlier month that sank the Sea Shepherd Wholesale China protest vessel Bethune skippered.In the work of the trial, Sea Shepherd announced it would not let Bethune join further protests because it found they had loaded zhjchv0709 a bow & arrows onto his vessel before it set sail — although they didn't intend using them against the Japanese whaling ships.
Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson said Replica Handbags Thursday that ban "was a legal strategy" as "the Japanese judges would (have been) hesitant to release Pete . in the event that they knew they was going to be (back) down in the southern ocean.""We spent half a million dollars & put every tiny bit of thought they could in to getting him out of jail & that was a strategy," they told New Zealand's National Radio.
"He's a hero to the conservation movement & we'd definitely welcome him back," they said. Bethune said earlier they was not planning to participate in anti-whaling cartier replica watches protests in the approaching Antarctic summer season.Sea Shepherd has been protesting Japan's whaling in Antarctic waters for years, & often has engaged in scuffles with Japanese whalers. It claims the research whaling program, an allowed exception to an international whaling ban, is a cover for commercial hunting.
Glenn Inwood, New Zealand spokesman for LG Portable Air Conditioner 2010 Japan's Tokyo-based Institute of Cetacean Research, said Bethune's conviction showed "Sea Shepherd is a criminal organization."Watson vowed that the group would return to Antarctica this season to continue its campaign against the Japanese whalers. Inwood said the whalers also planned to return.
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key called on both sides to keep "cool heads" while the international community struggles to come up with a compromise acceptable to whaling & non-whaling nations.
