South Korean team leads investigations as fishing boat with murdered crew members docks in Seychelles

The South Korean flagged fishing vessel Kwang Hyun 803 seen docked in Seychelles' Port Victoria on Friday. (Rassin Vannier Seychelles News Agency)

(Seychelles News Agency) - Investigators from South Korea are in Seychelles probing the deaths of the captain and chief engineer of a South Korean fishing vessel, the island nation’s police said Friday.

The deep-sea fishing boat arrived in Port Victoria at around 11 p.m. on Thursday carrying the bodies of the two men and a 16-member crew of Vietnamese, Indonesian and South Korean nationals.

“Investigations into the killings on board South Korean fishing Vessel Kwang Hyun 803 is being carried out by South Korean authority [and] facilitated to a certain extent by the local partners,” the police spokesperson Jean Toussaint said in a statement.

“While formalities are being done to repatriate the body of the Korean Captain and his chief engineer, the investigation team has arrested two Vietnamese, suspected to have murdered them,” Toussaint added. 

The Seychelles police says South Korean investigators are leading the probe into the killings of the South Korean captain and chief engineer. (Rassin Vannier Seychelles News Agency) Photo License: CC-BY

According to the KBS World, a South Korean online news service, a seven-member special investigative team of the South Korean Coast Guard is currently in the 115-island archipelago in the western Indian Ocean.

“According to South Korea's Coast Guard, the two suspects did not resist arrest and cooperated with investigators. All the remaining crew members were also known to be safe,” KBS World said.

According to the report the two accused are incarcerated on board the ship, which is under the surveillance of the Seychelles police.

The two Vietnamese men are said to have been intoxicated when they committed the crime reported by an Indonesian crew member – although the motive of the killings are unknown, reported KBS.

The Seychelles police said initial investigations have established that the vessel was not in the Seychelles’ territorial waters at the time of the killing incidents.

“Kwang Hyun 803’s last port of call was Victoria on the 21st of May 2016 and the incident is reported to have happened on the 19th of June,” concludes the police statement.