Japan Thursday insisted that Sea Shepherd anti-whaling activists were responsible for a collision between a protest boat and a Japanese whaler, after New Zealand took a neutral stance on the case.
Maritime New Zealand said in an investigative report issued Thursday that there was no evidence either the whaler Shonan Maru II or Sea Shepherd's Ady Gil deliberately caused the January 6 collision in Antarctic waters.
It also said the whaler did not deliberately ram and sink the militant environmental group's hi-tech trimaran during the high-seas confrontation.
Hours after the report was released in New Zealand, Japan's vice fisheries minister Takashi Shinohara told reporters: "Our position that the blame should be on Sea Shepherd and the Ady Gil, not on us, does not change at all.
"We cannot tolerate such a dangerous act," he said.
Japan has claimed that New Zealand captain Pete Bethune accelerated to put the Ady Gil in the path of the Shonan Maru II, while Sea Shepherd has said the whaler deliberately rammed the vessel, splitting it in two.
The New Zealand inquiry noted that a number of incidents in the weeks before the collision "contributed to a tense operating environment and probable uncertainty over each other's intentions," including an attempt by the Ady Gil to foul the Shonan Maru II's propeller with a mooring line.
"It's difficult for us to evaluate the New Zealand report," said a Japanese fisheries agency official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"But the collision would never have occurred if they had not come out to commit acts of sabotage."
Japan hunts whales in southern waters around Antarctica, making use of a loophole in a 1986 international moratorium that allows "lethal research".
The annual hunt has resulted in a spate of high-seas confrontations in recent years as conservation groups such as Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace seek to disrupt the Japanese fleet's activities.
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