Fernando Pereira was a freelance Dutch photographer, of Portuguese origin, who drowned when French intelligence detonated a bomb and sank the Rainbow Warrior, owned by the environmental organisation Greenpeace on 10 July 1985. The bombing of the boat had been designed to make the ship unsalvageable. The first smaller bomb bent the propeller shaft, making repair uneconomic. Pereira stayed inside the boat to get his camera and other pieces of equipment. The second, more powerful explosion, designed to sink the boat, caused a huge inrush of seawater that drowned Pereira. The Rainbow Warrior led a flotilla of yachts protesting against French nuclear testing at Mururoa Atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago of French Polynesia and was about to depart Auckland for a campaign of legal demonstrations in international waters near the French military operational areas at Moruroa Atoll.
The night of the bombing
The Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior lay moored at Auckland's Marsden Wharf on Wednesday, 10 July 1985. It had arrived in New Zealand from Vanuatuthree days earlier – a week after President Haruo Remeliik had been assassinated in Palau. Greenpeace campaigners were preparing the former North Seafishing trawler for the environmental group's biggest-ever protest voyage to Mururoa, one which they hoped would alert the world over France's nuclear testing and radioactive poisoning of the oceans. On board, supporters celebrated the 29th birthday of Steve Sawyer, the American co-ordinator of the Pacific Peace Voyage. Unknown to the Greenpeace activists, French secret agents Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, had set off in an inflatable dinghy across the 2 km stretch of the harbour from Mechanics Bay. When they arrived, they both swam underwater with the bombs, clamp and rope to the stern of the Rainbow Warrior. Tonel attached the smaller, 10 kg bomb to the propeller shaft. Camurier fixed the clamp on to the keel and ran out a rope to pinpoint a spot to attach the larger bomb next to the engine room. The hull explosive were meant to sink the ship and the propeller mine was meant to cripple it. Both bombs were timed to explode in just over three hours, at 11.50 pm. Once the explosives were set, the Frenchmen headed back to their hidden Zodiac. The first blast ripped a hole the size of a garage door in the engine room. The force of the explosion was powerful enough to push a freighter that was moored on the other side of Marsden Wharf 5m sideways. The Rainbow Warrior rapidly sank until the keel touched the harbor floor and the shocked crew scrambled on to the wharf. But Pereira dashed down a narrow stairway to one of the stern cabins to rescue his expensive cameras. The second explosion probably stunned him and he drowned with his camera straps tangled around his legs. Fernando's daughter Marelle, who was aged eight at the time of his death, appealed in 1995 through the French newspaper Libération to anybody who was involved in the bombing operation to tell her fully what had happened. "Now I am 18, I am an adult and I think by now I have the right to know exactly what events transpired surrounding the explosion which cost my father his life", she wrote. She also travelled to New Zealand to interview former Prime Minister David Lange and Greenpeace campaigners who sailed on the Rainbow Warrior.
