"These are in my custody now," a police officer said as he planted his boot on a pile of black whale tail cutouts with "RIP" written on them and which Greenpeace said represented 1,000 whales that will be killed this year by Japan.

St. Kitts police, some armed with M-16 semi-automatic rifles and others with batons and a tear gas launcher, then arrested 10 Greenpeace activists, including the group's spokesman Mike Townsley, and hauled them away.

"This beach is not a port of entry," said Sgt. Lionel Moore of the St. Kitts police force. He said the Greenpeace activists had broken immigration laws even though some had arrived in the island state via the airport and received proper entry stamps.

Before he was arrested, Townsley pointed out to the police that the IWC meeting ending on Tuesday had explicitly given its support to peaceful protests over whale hunts, which continue despite a 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling.

"What could be more peaceful than 1,000 cardboard whale tails?" he said.

WHALES' FATE

The IWC presides over the fate of the Earth's largest creatures, which were almost driven into extinction before the whaling ban.

But the IWC is bitterly divided between countries that think whales still need to be protected, such as Australia, Britain and New Zealand, and countries that think some species are sufficiently abundant to be hunted again.

Japan, which leads the pro-whaling bloc and has gathered powerful support from African, Pacific and Caribbean nations, has killed thousands of whales since 1986 under a scientific whaling program. Iceland also conducts scientific whaling while Norway is the only country that ignores the moratorium.

Beach vendors at the Marriott resort in St. Kitts where the IWC's June five-day meeting was taking place were intrigued by all the excitement.

"You've come a long way to get a taste of our jails," one of the vendors, who declined to give her name, joked to a young Greenpeace activist from Portugal just before he was detained.

Other conservationists criticized the police action.

"If the authorities want to arrest people for crimes of violent actions then they should be in the meeting room, not here on the beach," said Patrick Ramage of the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

A representative of the Netherlands, which is often embroiled in protest actions by Greenpeace because it is based in Amsterdam, came down to the beach to make sure none of the activists were hurt.