Malaysia seizes Chinese ship suspected of plundering sunken WWII battleships

SEOUL, South Korea — Malaysia has detained a Chinese vessel believed to have been salvaging the hulks of two British warships sunk in the South China Sea during the opening stage of World War II in the Pacific.

Malaysia’s Coast Guard took into custody a Chinese barge carrier, the Chuan Hong 68, on Monday, Japanese press outlets said, on charges of illegally anchoring. Separately, The vessel is registered to a company in the southern Chinese city of Fuzhou.

Malaysian authorities said Tuesday that more than 100 artillery shells of varying sizes had been found after a thorough search of the Chinese vessel. It said the shells were taken by the police bomb disposal unit to be detonated and that authorities are also investigating reports that dozens of old shells and other relics found in a scrapyard in Johor, in southern Malaysia, may have come from the war wrecks as well.

Fishermen and divers had reported their suspicions about the activities of the Chinese vessel last week. Photographs show the Chuan Hong 68 is equipped with a large, dredging crane; and MarineTraffic.com has designated the craft as a “grab dredger,” a class of vessel that excavates material from waterbeds.

British officials last week expressed concerns that war graves were possibly being plundered.

“We are distressed and concerned at the apparent vandalism for personal profit,” Director General of the Museum of the Royal Navy Dominic Tweddle said. “What we need is a management strategy for underwater naval heritage so that we can better protect or commemorate these ships.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning offered a noncommittal response to reporters in Beijing on Tuesday, saying that Beijing has asked Malaysia to “handle the case fairly in accordance with law.” She said Chinese citizens’ safety and legitimate rights and interests must be protected and urged Malaysia to notify Beijing of the progress of the investigation, the Associated Press reported.

According to US Naval Institute News, there are also concerns about the sanctity of U.S. Navy warships sunk in Southeast Asian waters in the early stages of the Pacific war, notably the cruiser Houston, destroyed with the loss of over 650 men.

Seeking non-radiated metals?

The British battleship HMS Prince of Wales and battlecruiser HMS Repulse lie on the floor of the South China Sea off Malaysia’s east coast. Their wrecks are believed to have been looted previously in 2015, as salvage crews seek valuable “prewar steel.”

Steel and other metals that predate the atomic age — also known as “low-background metals” — are uncontaminated by radiation. While the tiny amounts of radiation in modern metals are irrelevant for most applications, prewar metals, notably steel and lead, are ideal for highly sensitive particle experiments and in medical science devices like X-ray machines.

Such is the value of pre-modern materials that even lead from a 2,000-year-old Roman vessel has been used by scientists.

Tech magazine Gizmodo reported tons of prewar brass from Russian artillery shells were used by scientists to discover the elusive Higgs boson particle in 2012. Likewise, the American team that won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering previously unknown particles used prewar steel sourced from the US Navy battleship Missouri.

The Missouri was launched in January 1944, well before the first-ever atomic test in July 1945. The vessel was decommissioned and now serves as a floating museum. The Missouri’s metals were lawfully obtained by the scientific team.

By contrast, the British ships resting under the South China Sea were sunk in battle in December 1941, just days after Pearl Harbor. Their hulks form the graves of 842 sailors.

After the sinkings, British troops suffered serial defeats on the Malay mainland, before surrendering to a numerically inferior Japanese force in Singapore. That surrender is widely considered the worst defeat in British military history.

Today, only two U.K. patrol vessels are permanently assigned to the Indo-Pacific theater, though officials in London reportedly are monitoring the site of the wrecks by satellite.

Malaysian officials said the 32-man crew of the Chinese barge included 21 Chinese nationals, 10 from Bangladesh and a Malaysian.

• This story is based in part on wire service reports.