SYDNEY (Kyodo) Australian diplomats said in January last year that Japan's whaling fleet was not at fault for a crash that disabled the Ady Gil vessel belonging to the Sea Shepherd antiwhaling group in Antarctic waters that month, the Sydney Morning Herald reported Saturday.
The newspaper, citing U.S. documents released by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, said the diplomats told the U.S. Embassy in Canberra that the Japanese side would "come away clean" in any investigation of the collision.
But the U.S. Embassy, in its cable to Washington, said such a view would be "hard to swallow" for Australians, as "public outcry over the incident has been heavily one-sided and stoked by the opposition," and people were "already frustrated" that the government of then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was unable to stop Japan's Antarctic whaling.