Four people died and about 40 were still missing after a fishing boat carrying mostly asylum seekers to Australia sank off Indonesia's Java island, a rescue official said Wednesday. At least 157 people from Iran, Iraq, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh were rescued after the accident on Tuesday, said Rochmali, the head of the search and rescue agency in Bandung, the capital of West Java.
Three people drowned and another died in hospital, he said. Three were children, he said. The boat left a fishing village in West Java province for the Australian territory of Christmas Island early Tuesday but soon ran into trouble, West Java police chief Inspector General Suhardi Alius said. Police and local fishermen were still searching for the missing, but they had not found any more victims or located the vessel, Rochmali said.
"We don't even know where the boat sank and where it is now," he said. The survivors tried to flee after being rescued but were caught by police. "It's very difficult to get information from them," said Rochmali, who like many Indonesians goes by one name. "They have been evading questions." Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who last week declared that all future boatpeople would be banished to Papua New Guinea rather than being settled in Australia as refugees, said the sinking reinforced the need to deny asylum-seekers settlement in Australia. "We've seen too many drownings, we've seen too many sinkings, too many innocent people being lost at sea." More than 1,000 have drowned trying to reach Australia since Rudd took office in 2007.