One of the focuses of Cruise Law News is not only crime on cruise ships, but crimes in ports of calls.
Cruise lines have a legal obli.jpg)
gation to warn passengers of crimes which occur in the ports of call where they take their passengers. Cruise lines like Carnival and Royal Caribbean have agents in
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The Sun Sentinel reports that the Broward County Sheriffs Office arrested a Holland American Line (HAL) crew member for grand theft after he was caught stealing than $10,000 on a HAL cruise ship.
The newspaper states that the sheriff’s office charged Anthonius Novi Hartanto, age 42, from Indonesia with eleven counts of grand theft after
Nine years ago, I attended my first Congressional hearing regarding dangers to cruise passengers on the high seas. George Smith, of the Greenwich Connecticut area, had disappeared in the Aegean Sea during his honeymoon cruise. I represented Mr. Smith’s widow. Senator Chris Shays (R-CT) convened a hearing to inquire into the disturbing circumstances surrounding Mr. Smith’s
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This weekend was one of the bloodiest in the Bahamas this year. Seven people shot and three dead.
By my calculations, the death toll for the year in the Bahamas is 118 (last year was 119 murders). The murders are primarily in Nassau.
According to the Tribune, an 18-year-old out of jail on bail
This morning I received a number of emails from residents of Roatan about an extremely violent murder of a local merchant in Roatan (Coxen Hole) near the port.
Four men attacked and repeatedly beat Mr. Marcelino Vásquez (age 58), the proprietor of a store called "Commercial Vasquez." An article in Teledifusora Insular states that Mr. Vásquez
On December 3, 2014, two teenagers and two young men reportedly went hunting iguanas in the Bay Islands (Roatan) and never returned home.
A local television station in Roatan identified them as Cristian Leiva (age 15), Yeison Mejía (age 17), Marlon Reynaldo Lazar Melendez (age 24) and Luis Alberto Perez Chirinos (age 27). The names in the
Roatan, Honduras came onto my radar this year when several tourists contacted us after being robbed or sexually assaulted at gunpoint during cruise stopovers. Later we were the first to report on a Norwegian Cruise Line crew member who was shot in the head for his cell phone in Coxen Hole near the cruise port.
The last time that I wrote about Mexico I’m sure that I angered the tourism representatives there: Three Cruise Lines Plan to Return to Mazatlan: Will They Provide Bullet-Proof Jackets to Passengers?
Taking your family to a place like Mazatlan, Acapulco or most any port in Mexico seems unnecessarily risky to me. Admittedly
WPRO radio interviewed me this morning on its news talk radio show with Gene Valicenti about the New York Times article focusing on crime in Nassau, Bahamas.
WPRO has a large readership in New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
We talked about U.S. citizens who were victims of armed robberies. We talked about tourists
eTN Global Travel Industry News recently published an article about tourism issues in the United States Virgin Islands (USVI) and the USVI Commissioner of Tourism, Beverly Nicholson-Doty.
In its original publication, eTN cited several sources of information for the proposition that the USVI has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world. The territory has a
I had not previously heard of the specific incidents of crimes against U.S. citizens listed in yesterday’s advisory from the U.S. Embassy in Nassau. The embassy said that "over the past several weeks there has been an increase in the level of crime in areas where U.S. citizens live and frequent." The embassy listed seven
Yesterday, the U.S. took the unprecedented step of issuing a fourth crime warning for the Bahamas in 2014. The latest advisory was issued by the U.S. Embassy in Nassau. No other cruise destination in the world is the subject of such repeated and graphic crime warnings.
The advisory says warns against armed robberies, kidnapping and
In a short article entitled "Man Shot Dead," the Nassau Guardian announced today that 99 people have been murdered in the Bahamas so far in 2014. The murder rate will exceed last year’s total. The majority of the homicides have occurred in Nassau.
The Tribune newspaper in Nassau contains a letter to
The headlines in the Nassau, Bahamas newspapers over the last 24 hours are ominous – Man Shot Dead in Home Invasion, Shot Dead Defending Parents and Fatal Shooting in Fox Hill.
These murders take the number of homicides in the Bahamas to 96 and 97 for the year.
The Nassau newspapers
In July of 2013, Senator Rockefeller introduced the Cruise Passenger Protection Act of 2013. The bill was designed to provide the Department of Transportation (DOT) with greater authority to protect consumers and investigate complaints of unsafe conditions and ill-treatment on cruise ships.
The cruise industry opposed the proposed cruise legislation because it was designed to
This week the "Banana Coast" cruise port in Honduras opens for mega-cruise ship business.
The travel publications all appear to have written essentially the the same article announcing with great fanfare that large cruise ships will begin calling at the port in the Bay of Trujillo, Honduras. Billed as the newest cruise port in the
On Wednesday, Canada began advising its citizens to “exercise a high degree of caution, especially in Nassau, due to high rates of crime.”
On its government website Canada urged Canadian travelers to be vigilant and raised the alert status from normal. The warning effective September 17 2014 states:
"There is no nationwide advisory in effect
The Travel Channel just posted a cruise safety video as part of it’s Travel 911 series (be prepared before things go wrong on a cruise ship).
Its a very friendly sounding video that says that there’s nothing better than a cruise, but bad things can happen on cruise ships.
Here are some tips:
