UPDATED/Will the police take action against Il-Farrell ta’ Kastilja’s son?

UPDATE SUNDAY MORNING/The Times of Malta rang Shaun Farrell last night, who told the newspaper that the photographs are “more than a year old”. He claimed that he and the other men were in Libya and found the shark dead and washed ashore. They then had their picture taken with it and put it back dead in the sea. He decided to upload the pictures yesterday, a year later. “There is nothing more to say,” Farrell told the Times.

The likelihood that Farrell is telling the truth is very small. The photographs show clearly that the man are not on a beach, in Libya or anywhere else, but on a working-boat out at sea. The dead shark has clearly been hauled straight out of the water using the vessel’s winch/hoist. If they had really found it washed ashore, this would have meant tugging it by hand back into the water, floating it out into deep water far enough to reach the vessel (it would have sunk), and then tying it to the winch and hoisting it up onto the boat – all for a photograph. That this happened is impossible.

Shaun Farrell and his mates in the photographs work for a diving company that services tuna-pen operations. That’s why they are in uniform diving gear. The boat-deck on which they are standing is laden with netting and equipment associated with tuna-penning. We can make a safe assumption as to what happened here. They found the shark, which could be a porbeagle (also an endangered species protected under Maltese law) rather than a great white, in or near one of the tuna pens they were maintaining and killed it to protect the contractor’s valuable tuna.

We have to ask how many times this sort of thing happens, with protected species of shark being killed out at sea by tuna-pen contractors, where nobody can see them and where the evidence is easily disposed of and concealed for good, if these three divers are so cavalier about their trophy.

LAST NIGHT’S STORY:

Shaun Farrell, whose father Joseph Farrell is one of the Prime Minister/Labour leader’s main men, earlier today caught a young great white shark, a species protected under Maltese law, with two of his friends. He uploaded photos of the three of them posing with their catch, on his Facebook page, but removed them within the hour – probably after being informed that they had just committed a pretty serious crime.

The police have so far made a big show of tracking down men who shoot protected birds. Will they now go after Il-Farrell ta’ Kastilja’s son for catching and killing a shark that is an endangered species, the killing and capture of which has been a crime in Malta since 1999?

The newspapers need to keep their eye on this one. They’ll try to get away with it otherwise.