Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society vessel, the Steve Irwin, said his crew resumed its actions against the Japanese fleet shortly after the two men were handed to an Australian customs boat on Friday.

The pair -- Australian Benjamin Potts said Briton Giles Lane -- were held aboard the harpoon boat Yushin Maru No.2 for two days after they clambered onboard Tuesday to deliver a letter protesting the slaughter of whales.

"One hour after our people were released we then went after the Yushin Maru No. 2 and hit them with our stink bombs," Paul Watson, told AFP via telephone.

"What that will do is it makes it impossible to work on the deck for two days."

The Sea Shepherd ship is in the icy waters off Antarctica to prevent Japanese whalers from carrying out their annual whale hunt which this year will see about 1,000 of the giant creatures slaughtered.

Japan exploits a loophole in a 1986 international moratorium on commercial whaling to kill the animals for what it calls scientific research, while admitting the meat from the hunt ends up on dinner plates.

The Japanese company which owns the whaling vessels, Kyodo Senpaku Kaisha Ltd, condemned the butyric acid attacks on its ships which it likened to the work of terrorists.

"We safely released to an Australian patrol boat the intruders without any harm, even though Sea Shepherd has long threatened our safety," the company's president Kazuo Yamamoto said in a statement.

"The night attack is nothing more than an inhumane act for which they deserve to be called terrorists as they show no sign of honour as human beings," he said.

Watson said he had sent out a smaller boat to deliver the butyric acid bombs, or "stink bombs", which were intended to make the smell on deck so unpleasant that the whalers were unable to work.

"We are not down here hanging banners and taking pictures, we are down here to save whales," he said.

"We are going to keep hitting these guys... as long as we don't hurt anybody.

"The most important thing is this is day number nine that no whales have been killed."

Watson said the Steve Irwin, which had to follow the Australian customs boat some 50 miles away from the Japanese ship to collect its detained crew, was now searching for the Japanese fleet.

"We will continue to disrupt their activities," he said.

The whalers are also being carefully watched by Greenpeace activists, whose vessel Esperanza is trailing the factory ship the Nisshin Maru which the environmentalists claim to have kept out of the hunt for six days.

"No whales have been killed in that time," expedition leader Karli Thomas said in a statement.

"Now we've got two whalers out of the hunting grounds. If they try to begin whaling, we'll carry out peaceful direct action by putting ourselves in front of the harpoons to defend the whales."

Meanwhile, Japanese diplomats and government officials will hold an emergency meeting soon to discuss measures to prevent future attacks against whaling vessels, the online edition of the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper reported.

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