Icelandic authorities have seized a protest vessel operated by an anti-whaling group founded by Paul Watson, detaining its 21-member crew.

The Icelandic Coast Guard confirmed the action followed a distress call from the whaling ship Hvalur 9 on Thursday evening, whose crew reported feeling threatened by the protest vessel, named Bandero.

The Coast Guard stated that the Bandero subsequently disregarded instructions to leave Icelandic waters and later ignored an order to stop its engines.

Around midnight on Thursday, Coast Guard personnel, supported by the police special forces known as the Viking Squad, boarded the ship and took its crew into custody. Paul Watson, the prominent activist, was not among those aboard.

The Captain Paul Watson Foundation acknowledged the seizure, stating that the 21 crew members were being held on board without access to their phones.

The Bandero arrived in Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, on Friday, where police have now taken over the investigation. Icelandic national broadcaster RUV has reported that police intend to seek the crew's deportation and a ban from re-entering the country.

Iceland remains one of the few nations, alongside Norway and Japan, that continues to engage in commercial whaling.

The country sets annual quotas for the fin whales and minke whales fishermen are allowed to hunt in its waters. It exports most of its whale meat to Japan, but demand there has dwindled since Japan left the IWC and resumed commercial whaling in 2019.

The hunt is increasingly contentious in Iceland, where whale meat is now rarely eaten.

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, 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. On his release in December 2024, Watson said he would be careful not to be caught again.

“I have to make sure that I don’t land in Iceland or another country where Interpol might try to have me arrested again,” he said

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.