A Maltese military vessel used water cannons Sunday to prevent Greenpeace activists from a ramming into a large pen holding bluefin tuna, a military spokesman said.
Greenpeace said its activists in seven inflatable boats met "a great deal of resistance" when they tried to free the endangered bluefin tuna from the cage.
The pen, located around 25 nautical miles off the coast of Malta, is bound for a commercial fishing farm.
Greenpeace had stationed two ships in the Mediterranean, the Rainbow Warrior and Arctic Sunrise, to confront tuna fishing boats during the short tuna fishing season, which the European Union brought to an early close on June 9.
A Greenpeace activist trying to free tuna from a commercial fishing net off Malta was harpooned through the leg by French fishermen at the beginning of the month.
The group warns that industrial fishing of bluefin tuna, a sushi mainstay in Japan, has caused stocks to plunge by up to 80 percent in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, where they come to spawn in the warmer waters.
Earlier this year the European Union and the United States backed an international trade ban on tuna fished from these waters, but Japan lobbied successfully and the proposal was defeated.
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