Fishermen's foe pays with his life in Russia's poaching war

Sushi war erupts in Russian far east.

The head of the coast guard on the far east Russian island of Sakhalin woke to the sound of breaking glass and the smell of petrol. The "fish mafia" had come to get him.

As General Vitaly Gamov, 39, fought the flames of the petrol bomb that had been thrown through his bedroom window, his son, Ivan, 14, opened the door to see what was going on. Air rushed in, fanning the flames which engulfed Gamov and his wife.

Gamov died last week in the burns unit of a Japanese hospital. His wife, Larissa, is recovering from severe burns. Ivan survived.

Gamov is one of the most high profile victims of a war raging on the Russian side of the strait separating Sakhalin and the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.

His crime had been to ask all fishing vessels to carry tracking devices so that the coast guard could monitor them.

Fish-smuggling is big business for the Russian mob, and easy work thousands of miles from the gaze of Moscow. Japan wants cheap fish to sate its appetite for sushi, and Russians have no qualms about evading heavy export taxes. The speeding boats exchange machine-gun fire with anyone who gets in their way.

The coast guard estimates that $1bn (£700m) is lost in revenue every year through fish smuggling from the area of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the southernmost city on Sakhalin where the attack on Gamov took place.

"What we have here is a real war," said one coast guard officer, on condition of anonymity. "Gamov was one of the victims of this war. Revenge by the fish mafia is our main lead in investigating his death.

"We know the pirates... We hear their threats against our families. We live in the same villages. It is an impossible battle to fight.

But locals complain that heavy taxes make smuggling the only option. "We have to buy quotas from the administration to let us fish," said one local businessman.

"But my company can only afford the interest on the loan we need to buy the quota. Do you think a normal fisherman could afford a quota? Yes, it is a violation of the law, but how else can we survive?"