A retired United States Air Force officer claimed that a "confrontation" between a Philippine Navy ship and a Chinese Coast Guard vessel recently occurred near the waters off Panatag or Scarborough Shoal.

"Recently there was a confrontation about a month ago between a Chinese Coast Guard vessel and (BRP) Andres Bonifacio right by Panatag or Scarborough shoal,” retired Col. Raymond Powell from Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation Project Myoushu at Stanford University in California said in a forum in Makati on Thursday.

He said based on the image from the Scarborough Maritime Intelligence the confrontation happened on December 8, 2022, between one of the Del Pilar class patrol vessels of the Philippine Navy, BRP Andres Bonifacio and Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) 3303.

Powell said an image shows that BRP Andres Bonifacio that came in from the northeast was moving down towards the direction of Scarborough Shoal when the unknown vessel allegedly blocked the Philippine Navy ship.

"The unknown ship here is actually a China Coast Guard ship 3303. The reason its labeled unknown is that a couple of days prior to this for unknown reason it changed its AIS (automatic identification system) signal swapping two numbers around, so it’s now reflected as unknown but it's clearly the same ship. So it comes out and it put itself again between the Bonifacio and Panatag and the two ships converged to about 800 meters," he said.

"They go from North to South and then eventually the Bonifacio peels off and returns back to the Philippines. As far as I know this was never reported or was never discussed but we were able to find out because these are the kinds of tools that are now available to us," he added.

Powell stressed that with this technology "we can know a lot more right now about what's happening in Philippine waters".

"We just need to know where to look, how to interpret it and then how to tell the story and that's really our concept, how do we put ourselves in the midst of this great technology," he said. Robina Asido/DMS