1 Killed as 2 Blasts Sink Greenpeace Protest Ship

Two explosions ripped through the Greenpeace protest vessel Rainbow Warrior late Wednesday as it was docked here preparing for a campaign against French nuclear tests in the South Pacific. The ship’s photographer was reported killed, and the vessel sank.

“There must be a very strong presumption of sabotage” because there was nothing on board to cause two such explosions by accident, Greenpeace chairman Bryn Jones said in a London interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. The environmentalist group is headquartered in Lewes, England.

“Our actions are all peaceful--peaceful, direct actions,” Jones said at a news conference earlier. “We never endanger anybody else’s lives. We have not in the past provoked this kind of response.”

The blasts rocked nearby buildings, and several people on board were flung or jumped into the harbor as the vessel heeled over. Jones said the 160-foot ship sank by its stern but the bow was still tied to the dock in the Auckland harbor.

Divers Search Hull

Police and fire engines immediately converged on the scene as divers were summoned to search the hull.

Eleven people were reported to have been in the ship for the night when the first blast occurred.

In London, Greenpeace spokesman George Pritchard said photographer Fernando Pereira, a Portuguese, was killed. Pritchard said that after the first explosion, Pereira and another crewman went aboard to investigate. The crewman returned to the quay before the second blast, which killed Pereira.

In Washington, Chris Cook, national director of Greenpeace, said the rest of the crew was accounted for.

Peter Willcox, the American skipper of the vessel said: “We don’t know what happened. There were some loud bangs, the boat shook and we sank within four minutes. I had only time to walk off.”

Refitted in Florida

The Rainbow Warrior, a converted Scottish trawler that had recently undergone a $135,000 refit in Florida, arrived in Auckland on Sunday and was to have led a protest flotilla on a four-month Pacific cruise. It was to have visited the French nuclear-testing site at Mururoa atoll and to urge people in Australasia not to dump nuclear waste in the sea.

The 30-year-old ship has been seized in numerous countries since Greenpeace bought it in 1977 and used it to campaign against whaling, pollution and nuclear power.

Jones said the loss of the ship “is going to be a very, very serious blow. It was the flagship, and a great deal of love and attention went into that boat.”

The Rainbow Warrior is decorated with a rainbow design and large white doves on each side of the bow. The refit gave it a new diesel engine, sails to save on fuel, and a video unit explaining Greenpeace’s activities.

It also got new dinghies--its main weapon--which it sends to disrupt whaling operations or interfere with ships carrying nuclear wastes.

Detained in Spain

The Rainbow Warrior was detained by Spanish authorities in 1980 for preventing Spanish vessels from killing whales. In the same year it had a confrontation with the nuclear-waste-carrying vessel Pacific Fisher at the English port of Barrow, and with a similar vessel, the Pacific Swan, at Cherbourg in France.

Canadian officials seized it in 1981 and 1982 when it tried to disrupt seal hunts.

In 1983, the Rainbow Warrior was the base for dinghy raids to photograph Soviet whaling operations on the Bering Sea coast, and seven crew members were caught and briefly held in Siberian jails.

Greenpeace has three other vessels. In May it announced it was sending its newest ship, the Greenpeace, to Antarctica to establish a permanent base and claim the entire continent as parkland.