November 12, 2018 — HONOLULU — Federal investigators have charged ten fishermen with trying to smuggle nearly a thousand shark fins out of Hawaii.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said they are all Indonesian nationals and worked on the Kyoshin Maru, a longline fishing vessel from southern Japan.
“They have no clue what they were doing here. All they could tell me was ‘ikan,’ which means fish in Indonesian,” said Gary Singh, an attorney for one of the fishermen.
This comes eight years after Hawaii became the first state to ban possession of shark fins. The following year, the federal government strengthened its existing ban and the trade largely went underground near Hawaiian waters.