Eight Indonesian fishers are feared drowned and 11 have been rescued after spending six days without food or water on a barren island off the northwest Australian coast after a powerful tropical cyclone, authorities said yesterday.
Two wooden Indonesian fishing boats were caught in the path of Cyclone Ilsa, which made landfall on Friday as Australia’s most powerful storm in eight years, with winds gusting at an apparent record of 289kph.
One of the boats, the Putri Jaya, sank in “extreme weather conditions” on Tuesday or Wednesday last week while Ilsa was gathering strength over the Indian Ocean and heading toward the coast, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said in a statement, citing survivors.
Photo: AP
The other boat, the Express 1, ran aground with 10 fishers aboard in the early hours of Wednesday last week on Bedwell Island, a sandy outcrop about 300km west of the Australian coastal town of Broome, the agency said.
The only known survivor from the Putri Jaya spent 30 hours in the water before washing ashore on the same island, the statement said.
“They all remained [on Bedwell Island] for six days without food and water before being rescued on Monday night,” the agency said.
The Putri Jaya survivor used a fuel can to stay afloat at sea, Indonesian officials told Australian Broadcasting Corp.
The survivors were spotted on Monday by the Australian Border Force, which patrols the country’s northern approaches for smuggling and other illegal activity, from a plane on a routine surveillance mission.
A Broome-based rescue helicopter was deployed and winched all 11 aboard in failing light.
Gordon Watt, a manager at helicopter provider PHI Aviation, said the rescue helicopter crew had been unable to land on the sand.
“They had to conduct winch recoveries which, in itself, is a challenging task,” Watt said. “The time of day meant that nightfall was upon the crew during the rescue, so they had to transition to using night vision goggles.”
The survivors were taken to Broome Hospital.
The Border Force said in a statement that they were reported to “be in good health despite their ordeal.”
They have been flown from Broome to the northern city of Darwin, from where they would be flown back to Indonesia, the statement said, adding that Indonesian authorities have been notified.
“This incident highlights the dangers of undertaking journeys in small boats unsuited to rough seas and adverse weather events, both of which are common in Australia’s northern waters,” the statement added.
The missing Indonesian fishers are expected to be the only fatalities from Ilsa.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
SECRETIVE SECT: Tetsuya Yamagami was said to have held a grudge against the Unification Church for bankrupting his family after his mother donated about ￥100m The gunman accused of killing former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe yesterday pleaded guilty, three years after the assassination in broad daylight shocked the world. The slaying forced a reckoning in a nation with little experience of gun violence, and ignited scrutiny of alleged ties between prominent conservative lawmakers and a secretive sect, the Unification Church. “Everything is true,” Tetsuya Yamagami said at a court in the western city of Nara, admitting to murdering the nation’s longest-serving leader in July 2022. The 45-year-old was led into the room by four security officials. When the judge asked him to state his name, Yamagami, who
DEADLY PREDATORS: In New South Wales, smart drumlines — anchored buoys with baited hooks — send an alert when a shark bites, allowing the sharks to be tagged High above Sydney’s beaches, drones seek one of the world’s deadliest predators, scanning for the flick of a tail, the swish of a fin or a shadow slipping through the swell. Australia’s oceans are teeming with sharks, with great whites topping the list of species that might fatally chomp a human. Undeterred, Australians flock to the sea in huge numbers — with a survey last year showing that nearly two-thirds of the population made a total of 650 million coastal visits in a single year. Many beach lovers accept the risks. When a shark killed surfer Mercury Psillakis off a northern Sydney beach last
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
RSS