In recent hours, many people have shared on social media images taken from the Marine Traffic site showing about twenty vessels with Chinese flags, on different days and hours, off the coast of Flores Island in the Azores, within the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the Azores.
However, there are no ships with Chinese flags off the coast of this westernmost island of the Azores.
A source from the Portuguese Navy revealed that this is something that was “purposefully injected or not” into the platform, and is therefore “false.”
In addition to navigating at a much higher speed than normal, the vessels appear almost always at the same point, which in itself is suspicious.
Despite this, both the Navy and the Air Force patrolled the area and found no vessels, as confirmed on Thursday morning by the Regional Government of the Azores on its official website.
“The mission to inspect and patrol the Exclusive Economic Zone of the Azores has successfully ended, following the alert about 20 fishing vessels with Chinese flags south and southwest of Flores Island,” they begin by saying, adding that “the naval unit of the Local Command of the Maritime Police of Flores was on site and did not verify any ship,” as well as the Portuguese Air Force aircraft.
“It flew over the area beyond the reference area, including up to the limits of the national EEZ of the Azores subarea and did not verify any ship from this set,” they emphasize.
Everything leads to believe then, according to the Azorean Executive, “that this is AIS Spoofing,” that is, a deliberate manipulation of system data to deceive maritime vessels or monitoring systems.
Meanwhile, the Portuguese Air Force also confirmed that it was on site and that “the abnormal signals presented in various information systems” were “discordant with reality,” and therefore there were “no unauthorized vessels in the location.”
[News updated at 11:37 AM]
