Head of Greenpeace arrested on Scottish-company's rig

The global head of Greenpeace has been arrested after breaching an injunction to scale an Arctic oil rig operated by a UK company, the campaign group said today.

International executive director Kumi Naidoo volunteered to go to the drilling vessel in a bid to stop it operating, after Cairn Energy obtained an injunction from a Dutch court against Greenpeace breaching an exclusion zone around the rig.

The activists have been targeting the deep water drilling project off the coast of Greenland because of the damage they say a spill could do to the environment and the impact on the climate of exploiting new fossil fuel resources.

Cairn Energy obtained the injunction after a number of campaigners were arrested for protesting on the rig, as they demanded the company publish its plans for how it would deal with a spill.

Greenpeace said Mr Naidoo travelled to the Leiv Eiriksson vessel on an inflatable speedboat launched from the group's ship Esperanza, evading a Danish navy warship, and then climbed a 30-metre ladder up the outside of one of the platform's legs.

He carried the signatures of 50,000 supporters who are demanding Cairn explain how it would deal with a deep water drilling disaster similar to that which hit BP's Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico a year ago.

Greenpeace claims Cairn Energy has refused repeated requests to publish its oil spill plan.

Edinburgh-based Cairn Energy confirmed that members of the environmental group had boarded the Leiv Eiriksson but had been removed by the Greenland authorities without interrupting the operation of the platform.

In a statement, the company said: "Wherever it is active, Cairn seeks to operate in a safe and prudent manner.

"The Greenland Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum has established some of the most stringent operating regulations anywhere globally, which mirror those applied in the Norwegian North Sea."

But, speaking before he set out to scale the platform, Mr Naidoo, said: "The Arctic oil rush is such a serious threat to the climate and to this beautiful fragile environment that I felt Greenpeace had no choice to return, so I volunteered to do it myself.

"Cairn has something to hide, it won't publish its plan to clean up an oil spill here in the Arctic, and that's because it can't be done."

And he said: "For me this is one of the defining environmental battles of our age, it's a fight for sanity against the madness of a mindset that sees the melting of the Arctic sea ice as a good thing.

"As the ice retreats the oil companies want to send the rigs in and drill for the fossil fuels that got us into this mess in the first place.

"We have to stop them. It goes right to the heart of the kind of world we want and the one which we want to pass onto our children."