The mysterious case of the drug-smuggling fishermen

Maritime data is often flawed.

Will the existence of "damaged data" help overturn a verdict
in a drug smuggling case against five fishermen?
Actually, the vessel was fitted with an Olex navigational aid that tracked and recorded its movements. It is unlikely that any actual drug- running ship would have made carried such a system, because it provided an accurate record of exactly where it had been.

From BBC by Jim Reed and Adam Eley

In 2011, a group of men from the Isle of Wight was given a combined 104-year prison sentence for masterminding a £53m drug smuggling operation.

Does new evidence suggest they were innocent?

A new lawyer, Emily Bolton, is working on their case and believes that may be the case.

"It's like living in a ridiculous police drama," Sue Beere says.
Her husband Jonathan Beere is serving 24 years in a high-security prison in the Midlands, convicted of organising a complex operation to smuggle a quarter of a tonne of cocaine into the UK.
She vividly remembers the day police came to arrest him in January 2011: "They literally came through the door in the morning... a troop of men."

All she could think was that they had made "some stupid mistake" over his identity, and found the wrong man.
She says local police stopped to comfort her young son, saying: "Don't cry nipper, be brave, daddy will be home tonight."
But Jonathan Beere has not been back home since that day, and has so far served five years in jail.

Two of the other men, skipper Jamie Green and Zoran Dresic, also received 24-year sentences, while Daniel Payne received 18 years and Scott Birtwistle 14. They had been charged with conspiring to import Class A drugs.
Now a new lawyer, Emily Bolton, is working on their case.
She founded the Innocence Project New Orleans in the US, which has so far freed 25 prisoners, and has recently set up a new charity in the UK - the Centre for Criminal Appeals - to specialise in miscarriage of justice investigations.

Electronic navigation records (middle & right) show Green’s boat was never where the prosecution claimed it was (left) – cruising in the wake of the container ship Oriane in the Channel, to collect drugs thrown overboard

What happened in the Channel?

On 29 May 2010, a small fishing boat - the Galwad-Y-Mor - left the Isle of Wight on what the crew claim was a routine trip to catch lobster and crab in the Channel.

photo : TrawlerPhotos

That night, a large drugs operation led by the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) - known as Operation Disorient - was taking place, involving surveillance planes, a Border Agency patrol boat and police lookouts along the coast.
The authorities had intelligence that cocaine was being smuggled to Europe from South America on giant cargo ships, such as the container vessel MSC Oriane - which was one of nine from Brazil that appeared to be of particular interest.
At about midnight, the ship and the fishing boat briefly came close together - though exactly how close is disputed. The ship went on towards the European mainland, and the Galwad continued home, past Freshwater Bay - the western tip of the Isle of Wight.
The next day, at this same bay, a member of the public spotted 11 sacks tangled around a buoy - each packed with a pure form of cocaine.
The prosecution's case was that the sacks were pushed off the side of the container ship for the fishermen to retrieve from the sea, before taking them to the bay to hide or be picked up by another vessel.

MSC Oriane

But Ms Bolton disputes this.
"What the police are alleging [is that the Galwad] was able to pinpoint and locate 11 bags of cocaine in the English Channel, in shipping lanes, in the middle of the night in a storm," she says.
"We think we now have the evidence proving this simply couldn't have taken place."

Navigational data

At the trial, the prosecution relied on navigational data taken from on-board computers on the two vessels, which purported to show that - around midnight - the Galwad crossed the Oriane's wake. There would have been a short window for the 11 sacks of cocaine to be transferred to the fishing boat.
However, Ms Bolton says the prosecution's expert witness left out key plot points and used damaged data.

Her new analysis suggests the paths of the boats were never closer than 100m from one another, and that the sea's drift would have taken the drugs away from the fishermen's boat.
"If that intersection between the vessels never took place, there is no case," she says.

The men's fishing boat, the Galwad, has not seen the sea for years

The prosecution also points to a series of calls made to and from the satellite phone on the Galwad while it was in the Channel, suggesting someone on shore was co-ordinating the drugs drop. The defence said the timing was a coincidence and someone was just checking on the health of one of the other fishermen who was seasick - a migrant from Eastern Europe.
No traces of cocaine were ever found on the fishing boat, despite it being searched with specialised equipment.
The container ship, the Oriane, was also searched when it next touched British shores a few days later, but no trace of drugs was ever found. No-one on the Oriane was arrested.

Cliff-top surveillance

The Galwad spent 18 hours sailing back to its home port of Yarmouth in the Isle of Wight. On the way it stopped for about an hour in Freshwater Bay - its crew say to fish for mackerel.
That evening, the first arrests were made.
At this point though, the drugs had not been discovered.
This happened the following day, when a member of the public called to say he had spotted 11 multicoloured bags floating in Freshwater Bay.
This timeframe, Ms Bolton says, was crucial.
At the time the fishing boat was said to have hidden the drugs in Freshwater Bay, two officers from Hampshire police were watching from the cliff tops as part of the police operation.
In the officers' logs before the drugs were found, they recorded someone on the fishing boat throwing six or seven items overboard at intervals - which the fishermen say could have been rubbish bags full of old bait.
But the next day, after the drugs were discovered, the police lookouts changed the official log - as they are allowed to do - to clarify what they saw.
In the new version they reported 10 to 12 items the size of a holdall, tied together in a line and deployed from the boat followed by a red floating buoy - a description that almost exactly matched the drugs that were picked up by the police boat.

 Freshwater Bay, where the drugs were found

The two police surveillance officers then told different accounts in court.
One said he was convinced of the significance of the holdalls at the time; the other said he thought little of it until after the drugs were found the next day.
As a result, the new defence team claims the accounts cannot be relied upon.
"These are officers that are trained to get the details right every single time - and we are not talking about small details," Ms Bolton explains.
"We are talking about big changes, about what they saw and also where they saw it from."

Police footage

At trial, both police lookouts were adamant they had seen 10 to 12 sacks thrown off the fishing boat along with a buoy.
After making the first log entry, they said they had seen extra bags thrown off the boat, so the amended version was the full picture of everything they had recorded that day.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission did look into the case and, though it found inconsistencies in the officers' evidence, decided it was not enough to show they had fabricated their accounts.
Complaints against the two officers were dismissed.
Hampshire Police also said they had no ongoing complaints relating to this investigation.

Fresh appeal?

Soca, now rebranded as the National Crime Agency (NCA), said at the time that the operation had stopped a huge amount of cocaine from reaching the streets of the UK.
Ms Bolton's new evidence has been passed to the criminal cases review commission, which will decide if the five men can launch a fresh appeal.
She believes there was a motive for Soca to implicate the five men.

  The view from Cowes, Isle of Wight

"At this stage in the investigation it appears Operation Disorient really needed to get a result. They had committed a lot of resources to this investigation and needed someone to be responsible, and they started focusing on the fishing boat.
"From then on, they interpreted all evidence that came before them as pointing to guilt, and meanwhile ignored or didn't seek other evidence which pointed in the opposite direction."
The NCA said it could not comment while that investigation was ongoing.
Hampshire Police said: "It would not be appropriate to comment on operational matters led by another agency [the NCA]."

Links :

• BBC : Isle of Wight lobster pot drugs runners sentenced
• DailyMail : Police doctored GPS data which saw fishing boat crew jailed for £53million drugs bust: New evidence shows the men couldn't have dropped bags of cocaine into the sea /  Revealed: Chart proving jailed 'Cocaine Crew' CAN'T be guilty four years after the men were convicted / Murky riddle of the £53m Isle of Wight cocaine job: New evidence throws into question the guilty verdicts of the five fishermen jailed for 104 years
• InsideTime : A fishy tale
• OntheWight : Accusation of officer tampering puts £53m Yarmouth cocaine bust in question
• IsleWightCountyPress : How technology scuppered £54m international drug deal 
• 5men104years website

Stable flight - foiling's holy grail

"The key to speed in the America's Cup is stable flight," says Sir Ben Ainslie.

So how does Land Rover BAR achieve foiling's holy grail? 

Links :

• BBC : The tech helping Sir Ben's 'flying' boat go even faster

Seal in a bait ball

Seal in a bait ball - Amazing drone footage

On the surf spot of Bondi Beach in Sydney

Super slippery coatings are good for way more than ketchup bottles

courtesy of Getty Images

From Wired by Sarah Zhang

Who among us can deny the satisfying whoosh of ketchup coming clean out of a bottle?
You might remember the ketchup video that lit up the Internet a couple years ago: an anonymous hand tipping a glass bottle of ketchup, which slid out with nary a streak of red. It was magic.

OK, fine.
It was physics.
And the physics of slippery surfaces could be far more revolutionary than a trick for saving a few ounces of condiment.
Sticky stuff sticking to surfaces is a fact of life: Plates and utensils get crusted with food and someone has to wash them each and every time.
But in a world of super slippery coatings, the very concept of “cleaning” goes away.

Ketchup Bottle w/ LiquiGlide Coating from LiquiGlide

Startups like SLIPS Technologies and LiquiGlide, the latter of which made the viral ketchup video, are now branching out into the world of industrial applications.
Think ketchup is hard to get out?
Try crude oil.
Or barnacles that attach themselves to a ship like, well, barnacles.
Or bacteria building up a slimy layer in IV lines.

The two companies’ coatings share a basic principle: the liquid-impregnated surface.
As weird as that may sound, it comes out of the idea that to make a surface slippery, you want to make it as smooth as possible.
“The problem is you can’t take a solid surface and make it perfectly smooth on a molecular level,” says Daniel Behr, CEO of SLIPS Technologies.
Instead, these companies coat the jagged surface with a thin layer of liquid, which is smooth.

Both companies are creating a suite of liquid-impregnated surfaces tailored to different applications. The exact formulation of the liquid depends on what you’re trying to keep off the surface—whether ketchup or crude oil or the glue barnacles use to stick to ships.
The key difference is that SLIPS’s uses more liquid over the surface than LiquiGlide’s.

One of SLIPS’s biggest projects right now is combatting the problem of barnacles and mussels—one that actually wastes a huge amount of fuel.
When barnacles and mussels take over a ship’s once-smooth hull, they create drag.
More drag means more fuel to travel the same distance.
The Harvard team that created SLIPS won a $2.7 million Department of Energy grant and is now monitoring square meter patches of its slippery anti-barnacle paint on ships everywhere from New England to the United Kingdom to the Indian Ocean.

Similar coatings could make stents, catheters, and IV lines safer.
Bacteria often grow into a film on these devices, only to make trouble when they infect the body. SLIPS vice president Scott Healy said his company is working with four different medical device companies to test their coatings, though he declined to name them or give specifics.

And last year, just before LiquiGlide made a splash partnering with Elmer’s for glue bottles, it announced with less fanfare that it was getting into the oil and gas industry.
Thick, sticky oil can flow through miles of pipeline before it reaches your house.
The company said it was experimenting with coatings for piles and large, stainless steel tanks.
“We remain excited about [consumer packaged goods] space,” CEO Dave Smith said in an email. “We are also actively exploring applications in other industries.”

Financially, these coatings seem to make sense in places when they would actually save you money, i.e. with an expensive product.
(So not ketchup.)
“It could be very attractive for high end, high sensitivity applications,” says Ali Erdemir, who works on coatings at Argonne National Laboratories.
For example, he speculated, lenses on minimally invasive surgical equipment—or those on surveillance drones and planes flying high in the sky.
The joke goes that if you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
And it you’re super slippery coating, everything looks like a sticky surface to make no-stick.

Bigger than the weather: A corporate cover-up on the high seas

In 2015, 3 South African seamen disappeared in the Southern Ocean.

What happened to them ?

(Bansi cyclone)

From Daily Maverick by Kevin Bloom

In 2015, after three South African seamen went missing somewhere in the vastness of the Southern Ocean, their families tried to trace their final movements.
Uncovering the truth would require going to war with the world’s largest tourism conglomerate, a €20-billion-a-year monolith that had no interest in fielding questions.

Sailing routes and Cyclone Bansi path.

Credit: Andrea Teagle/CARTO

On 12 January 2015, when the International Space Station was 400km above the eastern fringe of the African island of Madagascar, an image was beamed down to earth.
Unscrambled by computers at Nasa’s Earth Observatory, the picture looked like a scene from a sci-fi film.
Perhaps the swirling violet abyss at the photograph’s focal core reminded Nasa’s engineers of the wormhole into which Hollywood astronauts occasionally disappear – and if so, at least for the families of those caught in the vortex, the analogy was apt.

The churning neon thing was the lightning-lit eye of Cyclone Bansi, which had formed the day before and was now gusting at 185km per hour, or 99.89 knots.
It would crest twice over the next few days, into category 4 (113 to 136 knots) and category 5 (137 knots plus), before petering out into a weak extra-tropical system by 19 January.

A view of Cyclone Bansi from the International Space Station.

Credit: NASA

Into this maelstrom sailed a new Leopard 44 catamaran, assembled in Cape Town by boat builders Robertson and Caine.
Under different circumstances, the yacht would have taken the slower and safer route from Cape Town to the Thai island of Phuket, but TUI Marine, the world’s largest yacht charter operator – and the new owner of the Leopard 44 – had a reputation for getting its assets delivered fast.

An image of the upturned hull of what was likely Moorings A5130, Indian Ocean, May 2015; co-ordinates 27-26.4S and 064-30.0E

Saturday, 23rd January. Catamaran hull located adrift at sea:
At 15h30, Saturday, 23rd January, NSRI Agulhas duty crew launched a Sea Rescue craft to attempt to locate a capsized catamaran reportedly sighted approximately 42 nautical miles off-shore of Agulhas. NSRI Hermanus launched a sea rescue craft to stand-by in the area as back-up.
The floating capsized casualty Catamaran has reportedly been sighted on numerous occasions and hopes are that she is the Catamaran Sunsail that has been missing for a year.
On arrival on the scene, following a brief search, the upturned hull of the Catamaran was photographed by NSRI and NSRI rescue swimmers free dived to investigate markings and as much as could be investigated under the hull. NSRI could not positively identify her as Sunsail.
Video by NSRI Agulhas.

The South African office of TUI Marine, which traded as Mariner Yachts, was after all just a tiny outpost in a global operation headquartered in the state of Florida, US – and TUI Marine, in turn, was a tiny subsidiary of the Hanover, Germany-based TUI Group, the world’s largest travel and leisure conglomerate, with 76,000 employees, more than 300 hotels, over 140 aircraft, and turnover for the 2014/15 financial year of €20-billion.

For delivery skippers out of South Africa, as for hotel staff, travel agents and cruise ship crews the world over, TUI had become synonymous with employment itself.
If a contractor had issues with a weather forecast – even one as potentially catastrophic as a tropical cyclone – it was odds-on that he’d be replaced.

Read the full Daily Maverick investigation