Screaming Skull
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It is was an attempt to smuggle explosives, i wonder what was the ship doing for one full month anchored one and a half KM away from the port, before it was unloaded. Does explosive smuggling done in such a manner that it is unloaded at the Indian official port, where it will go checking by Indian authorities customs & intelligence agencies, so much official paper work has to be done before something is let go of the port and the item is not a small quantity but 800KG.
Where was the Indian coast guard for one month when the ship anchored in its waters ?? Nobody went to the ship or any communication done with it that who are you guys, what are you carrying ?? That is very strange. I believe for smuggling such material, its not done through official Indian ports rather through illegal ways, the way we use to see in Indian/English movies when drugs or such material is offloaded not through ports.
I presume you have no idea about how cargo is handled in Indian ports?
IF a ship has the license to operate in Indian waters and transport cargo to and from our ports, the coast guard and Navy will allow the ship to enter Indian territorial waters. They do not have to inspect the cargo of a ship that has clearance and necessary papers to be where it is.
Inspection of the cargo is done only after it is offloaded at the port. The customs officials generally follow random inspection method and inspect only a few crates out of a number of crates in a container. The customs officer carries a matrix of crates in a chart, which will tell him exactly which crates to inspect – the sequence is randomly generated by a computer and the number of crates to be inspected is in a fixed ratio of the total number of crates in a container.
Smugglers some time take their chances and conceal the prohibited material amongst a large cargo of genuine material to avoid detection. In this case too that might have been possible. The ship may have obtained clearance to deliver a certain genuine item but may be concealing Ammonium Nitrate amongst a cargo of something else. Probably they had concealed it well enough but an all Pakistani crew may have aroused the suspicion of the customs officials and they may have gone for a full scale inspection.
As for why the ship was anchored off the coast for a long period of time – well that is a common recurrence. Due to large traffic at ports, ships are usually made to berth some distance away from the port so that already berthed ships can pass off easily and the ships in queue can move into the port. Also, remember that all cargo ships take back cargo too. So, if the shipment to leave from Indian port comes only after a month, a cargo ship will wait for so much time instead of going back empty handed - that by the way is the guiding rule of logistics.
So, you see there are enough reasons to suspect foul play in this case. Though nothing can be said for sure, the story certainly is plausible and needn't be concocted as you make it out to be.