More than 300 illegal migrants were feared to have drowned off India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal, police and officials said yesterday.
Two Indian navy ships have joined coastguard vessels searching for the missing men, officials said.
“We are looking for them in all possible places near the south of Little Andaman as we think there could be more survivors,” Andamans defense spokesman Mannu Virk said in Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar islands.
“We will continue our search and rescue operation in all the islands,” he said.
Survivors said the men swam for shore after drifting for weeks in a small boat with little food or water and only a plastic sheet for a sail.
“The survivors said they saw a lighthouse late at night and thought they had reached the shore,” Ashok Chand, a senior police officer, said in Port Blair.
“Nearly 300 jumped into the sea, one following the other, causing the deaths it seems,” he said.
Authorities in Port Blair said the men were mostly Bangladeshis and some Myanmar nationals, aged between 18 and 60.
Setting sail for Malaysia in six boats 45 days ago, the would-be migrants soon became lost and drifted through the Bay of Bengal.
Coastguard officials said on Sunday 88 men from an original group of 412 had been rescued from a boat found near Little Andaman island, about 90km south of Port Blair.
Yesterday they put the number of survivors at 102.
Two more bodies were found yesterday, taking to seven the number recovered since the boat was discovered on Thursday.
Survivors told authorities that seven others had died at sea and their bodies had been dumped overboard.
The coastguard is investigating how the men drifted into Indian waters, and how the survivors came to be in one boat.
According to survivors, there were a total of 412 people on six boats which were spotted by the Thai Navy after they reached Thai waters.
The migrants were detained for about four weeks and later put on non-mechanized boats with some bags of rice in the high seas to reach home, survivors told Indian officials.
They were drifting in the Bay of Bengal for 12 days before they reached the vicinity of the island group, some 1,200km off the Indian mainland.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN