Collision Course? U.S. Navy Tracking N. Korean Ship
Officials said the U.S. is monitoring the voyage of the North Korean-flagged Kang Nam, which left port in North Korea on Wednesday. On Thursday, it was traveling in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of China, two officials said on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence.
What the Kang Nam was carrying was not known, but the ship has been involved in weapons proliferation, one of the officials said.
The ship is among a group that is watched regularly but is the only one believed to have cargo that could potentially violate the U.N. resolution, the official said. [AP, Anne Gearan and Pauline Jelinek]
Fox News adds that the destination appears to be Singapore, and quotes a “senior U.S. official” as saying that the ship is believed to be “of interest.” Navy aircraft have the ship under 24/7 watch.
What about the Kang Nam’s notorious history? It’s hard to say. Comparing the photograph in the Fox story to this one in the Daily NK, the Kang Nam being pursued now looks like the same ship as the 2,035 ton Kang Nam I. Then again, I don’t have a photograph of the Kang Nam III, which was detained in Tokyo harbor in 2004 for safety violations, or the Kang Nam V, which was detained in Hong Kong in 2006, also for safety violations, but while under U.S. Navy suspicion for carrying prohibited cargo of some kind. Judging their very different tonnages, however, the Kang Nam V probably doesn’t look much like the Kang Nam I.
That same year, the Kang Nam I was also detained in Hong Kong, also for (you guessed it) safety violations … and outdated nautical charts. A Navy ship, the USS Gary, had followed the Kang Nam I there, but when Hong Kong port authorities searched the ship, they found it empty. (A big hat tip to the excellent Flags of Convenience blog for assembling a lot of this information.)
To make this even more confusing, the North Koreans have a habit of renaming and reflagging their ships constantly. Take the case of the North Korean dope smuggling ship Pong Su:
The Pong Su sailed from North Korea to Singapore in 2003 under a North Korean flag. The vessel then switched its registration to Tuvalu and sailed on to Australia, where witnesses saw a dinghy coming ashore with what proved to be the shipment of heroin. [N.Y. Times]
It’s frighteningly easy to do this:
[W]eapons could be loaded on a North Korean ship flying its own flag, and the registration of the ship could be altered after it left port. “In the middle of the night, they could change the name and change the flag,” said Gary Wolfe, a maritime lawyer at Seward & Kissel, a New York law firm. [….]
Changing the registration of a ship — and therefore its flag — is fairly simple. A ship owner simply sends the necessary paperwork to a country’s ship registry, along with a fee of as little as $1,000. The vessel is not required to visit the country where it is registered, or even go to port.
North Korea had previously favored flagging its ships with Cambodia. As of 2006, it preferred landlocked Mongolia and Tuvalu.