Coast guard personnel on Saturday arrested a Chinese man after he swam from China to Kinmen County, the Coast Guard Administration’s (CGA) Kinmen-Matsu-Penghu Branch said yesterday.
The man was the second Chinese in a week to have been caught illegally entering the nation by swimming to Kinmen.
On Aug. 6, a man from Shandong Province was caught after swimming for seven hours from China to Kinmen, helped by three children’s swimming rings, the branch said.
In Saturday’s incident, military personnel stationed on Lesser Kinmen, also known as Lieyu (烈嶼), reported seeing an inflatable object at sea about 500m away from a maritime patrol station and asked the Kinmen Coast Guard patrol squad to help identify it, the squad said.
Coast guard personnel spotted a suspicious person and waited at locations where he could land, it said.
When he approached the shore, coast guard personnel arrested him, it added.
The man, surnamed Wang (王), was found carrying only four PET bottles for floatation and two packages of instant noodles, the squad said.
Born in 1976, Wang is registered as a resident of Anhui Province.
During questioning, he said he departed from Zhangzhou in China’s Fujian Province at 10pm on Friday and swam to an unknown islet to rest.
Wang then departed from the islet to Kinmen at 10am on Saturday, the squad added.
Lesser Kinmen is 6km from the Chinese coast and the main island of Kinmen is a few kilometers farther away.
Wang said he had no regular job and made a living by reselling items collected from trash, squad deputy head Wang Jung-chung (王榮忠) said.
The swimmer said he did not want to live in China and intended to build a new life in a new environment to escape Beijing’s control.
He bought four 2-liter bottles of soda, made a raft with the empty bottles and fashioned a paddleboard from items he collected from the trash, the squad said.
The case was referred to the Kinmen District Prosecutors’ Office for investigation on suspicion that Wang contravened the Immigration Act (入出國移民法) and the National Security Act (國家安全法).
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