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Illegal immigrants found hiding in back of truck

Coast guard personnel found 31 Chinese and three Russian illegal immigrants hidden inside a truck yesterday, coast guard officials said.

The immigrants, all young women, had traveled to Taiwan by boat from China, officials said.

The women told interrogators they had arrived near Hualien before being transferred by truck to Taipei.

They were found hiding in a cramped space behind black panels on the truck in Taipei early yesterday morning.

The women told television reporters they had survived the past few days on bottles of water. Cable TV stations showed them eating a noodle breakfast at a coast guard interrogation center in Keelung.

One woman said the people smugglers on the ship had threatened them.

"If we are discovered and you make a noise, we'll throw you into the sea," one young woman quoted a smuggler as saying.

The same woman told TV reporters the smugglers had said they were taking them to the Chinese city of Fuzhou, not to Taiwan.

The latest discovery followed the deaths of six Chinese women who were forced by their human traffickers to jump ship when they were discovered by the coast guard on Tuesday. Four suspects are in custody.

In related news, China yesterday lashed out at President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), saying he had defended the "barbarous" killing of the six Chinese women.

Chen had made "absurd remarks" to distort the facts surrounding the deaths of the women, who had tried to go by boat to Taiwan in search of work, the China Daily reported, citing Beijing authorities.

In his remarks on the deaths, which took place early Tuesday, Chen said China had to shoulder some of the responsibility.
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