MANILA, February 27 ------ Philippine Coast Guard spokesperson for the West Philippine Sea Commodore Jay Tarriela confirmed that the Chinese Coast Guard has once again deployed floating barriers in the West Philippine Sea. "The Chinese Coastguard once again installed their floating barrier last Feb 22. This is few hours before they monitored the presence of BFAR vessel. It supports our hypothesis that every time they install barrier, every time they monitor BFAR will be sending their vessel, whenever they monitor it, they are going to install the barrier," he said.
According to Tarriela, it was the fishermen themselves who spotted the floating barriers in Bajo de Masinloc. However, he mentioned that the Chinese Coast Guard removes the barriers when there are no Philippine vessels in the area. Tarriela also emphasized that part of China's actions includes jamming the tracking system of Philippine vessels. He further stated that this is the third time it has happened, preventing the ships from transmitting automatic identification signals (AIS).
Through the AIS system, the exact location of the ships is determined. "We are actually suspecting that peoples Republic of China has the capability to jam our AIS transmission. When we deployed BRP Teresa Magbanua, we know for a fact na ang AIS niya ay turned on, but at some point nawawala yung signal niya... BRP Datu Tamblot also experienced the same thing. Also for this deployment, recently napansin namin na yung BRP Datu Sanday also lost yung AIS transmission niya," Tarriela said. "We also suspect that they are doing this for them to support their narrative na every time nandoon tayo, sinasabi na they are successful driving us away, the Philippine government vessel," he added.
Due to the jamming, they were unable to monitor the ships. Despite this, the Philippine Coast Guard was able to communicate with and monitor the situation of the ships that sailed out and found out that they were safe.
Source: news.abs-cbn.com