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The world's most prominent anti-whaling skipper, the Canadian Paul Watson, claimed today to have been shot in the chest in a clash with a Japanese whaler in the Antarctic.

Mr Watson, captain of the Sea Shepherd vessel the Steve Irwin, said that he had been saved from injury by his bulletproof vest but two members of his crew were injured by flash grenades thrown from the whaler Nisshin Maru early today.

Japanese authorities denied that the whalers fired any gunshots and said that they had simply thrown sound-emitting "warning balls" after the Sea Shepherd activists hurled bottles of rotten butter, paper bags of white powder and bottles of unidentified white liquid at them.

“Whales might be cute, precious animals, but injuring human beings to protect whales is unforgivable,” Nobutaka Machimura, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary, said. “I think the Government has to take necessary measures, which includes the use of warning balls."

Mr Watson, a veteran anti-whaling campaigner who was one of the original Greenpeace skippers before a disagreement over tactics in the 1970s, insisted that he had been hit and issued a photograph showing him with a bullet and a bent badge. The campaigner said that he felt a thud in his chest during this morning's confrontation and later found a bullet lodged in his Kevlar vest.

“What hit me was a bullet, it wasn’t a flash grenade. We pulled it out of the vest,” Mr Watson told Australia's ABC radio. “If I wasn’t wearing the vest, it would have been pretty serious."

The latest claims of violence from both sides come as the International Whaling Commission meets at Heathrow, London, to discuss its future and procedural issues. The meeting is not discussing matters of substance, but is looking at ways of addressing what some see as an impasse between those countries that want commercial whaling and those who do not.

There are concerns that the split over whether the IWC exists to manage commercial whaling or as a conservation body is preventing work to preserve whales such as preventing endangered species being killed as “by-catch” in fishing, and addressing the impacts of climate change and habitat degradation.

The Japanese whaling fleet is currently in the Southern Ocean, with the declared aim of catching 935 minke and 50 endangered fin whales as part of its annual “scientific programme”, exploiting a loophole in the global moratorium.

But it has faced international condemnation, including from the UK, for the hunt and its fleet has been dogged by anti-whaling campaigners who have been chasing it around the Southern Ocean for months in a bid to disrupt the whaling.

According to Sea Shepherd, the whalers are breaking international conservation law by targeting endangered whales in a designated sanctuary in violation of the global moratorium on commercial whaling.

A court ruling passed in Australia also bars Japanese whalers from the Australian Antarctic Economic Exclusion Zone, and the conservationists claimed the latest incident occurred inside Australian waters.

Last month a British activist Giles Lane, 35, from Brighton, was among two people held on Japanese whaling boat Yushin Maru 2 for several days after boarding it from the Steve Irwin. Closer to home, a Sea Shepherd protester was arrested for trespass yesterday after scaling the Japanese embassy in London to lower their flag to half-mast and unfurl a banner in protest against the “sham” of claiming its hunt was for research.

Martin Wyness, 50, from Hereford said his protest was timed to coincide with the IWC meeting to urge the commission to encourage Japan to “start behaving like a responsible nation”.

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