Migrant Boat Sinks Off Indonesia with 250 on Board
A heavily overloaded boat packed with around 250 Afghan and Iranian migrants seeking asylum in Australia sank off Indonesia, with bad weather and high seas hampering rescue efforts Sunday, officials said.
The fiberglass vessel was following a well-worn, and occasionally disastrous, route from the southern coast of Java to the remote Australian territory of Christmas Island when it sank on Saturday, officials said.
Fishermen and rescuers have so far plucked 33 people -- 30 men, a woman and two children -- from the sea despite strong currents and waves of up to five meters (16 feet), said a search and rescue official in Trenggalek district.
The boat was carrying around 250 people when it sank 40 nautical miles (74 kilometers) off Prigi beach in eastern Java on Saturday, said the official, Kelik Purwanto.
Survivors were floating in the sea for six hours before fishermen rescued them, survivors and officials said.
Purwanto said that around 150 rescue officials had been deployed to comb the sea to look for the passengers still missing from Saturday's disaster, which occurred 640 kilometers (400 miles) southeast of Jakarta.
One survivor, 17-year-old Afghan student Armaghan Haidar, said he was sleeping when a storm came up and began to rock the boat.
"I felt water touching my feet and woke up. As the boat was going down, people were panicking and shouting and trying to rush out," he told Agence France Presse.
"I managed to swim out and hang on to the side of the boat with about 100 others. (There were) about 20 to 30 others with life jackets, but another 100 people were trapped inside," he said.
"There was only water around us, no island, nothing. The huge waves swept away 20 people," he added.
Yoso Mihardi, a spokesman for the Trenggalek district government, said that the boat had a capacity of 100, but was overloaded with 250 people.
"That, combined with heavy rain and high waves, might have caused the boat to tip over and capsize," he said.
Australia Sunday called the incident "a terrible tragedy", but activists pointed to Canberra's refugee policy as partly responsible.
"Our focus today is on the search and rescue effort and our thoughts today are with the people who died and with the families of those still lost at sea," Australian Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare said.
"Whenever people make a dangerous journey and risk their lives, I am concerned," he said, adding that Australian officials were working with Indonesian counterparts.
Thousands of asylum-seekers head through Southeast Asian countries on their way to Australia every year and many link up with people-smugglers in Indonesia for the dangerous sea voyage.
Survivors said that they and the other passengers came from Iran and Afghanistan, and they had paid agents between $2,500 and $5,000 to seek asylum in Australia, according to Purwanto.
"According to them, they had flown from Dubai to Jakarta and took buses to an unidentified location in Java to board the boat. They said they were heading to Christmas Island," the search and rescue official said.
"They had been out at sea for 23 to 25 hours. They might have washed up on nearby islands, so we must try to rescue them as soon as possible."
Australia has failed in its efforts to set up a regional processing center in neighboring countries to reduce the flow of asylum-seekers heading to its shores.
Canberra had intended to deter people-smugglers by sending up to 800 asylum-seekers arriving by boat to Malaysia, in return for accepting 4,000 of Kuala Lumpur's registered refugees.
But the proposal was scotched in August by the High Court which placed all offshore processing in doubt.
Australia has warned refugees against attempting to come by boat, with officials often citing a December 2010 shipwreck at Christmas Island in which close to 50 people are believed to have died in wild seas.
More than 5,500 people are held in immigration or community detention centers in Australia, and the number of boatpeople arriving ballooned to almost 900 in November, with at least nine ships arriving in its waters this month.
Source: Agence France Presse
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