The Canadian navy on Thursday intercepted a cargo ship carrying almost 500 Sri Lankan asylum seekers and prepared to screen them, fearing some could belong to the defeated and banned Tamil Tiger rebels.
After days of tracking by Canadian and US authorities, the navy and Canada Border Services Agency staff boarded the MV Sun Sea after the cargo ship appeared to veer from its expected destination in the Vancouver area, authorities said.
The HMCS Winnipeg “attempted to hail the Sun Sea several times and, after establishing communications, the vessel declared that it had refugees on board,” Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said, as quoted by public broadcaster CBC.
The Thai-flagged ship’s skipper said that some 490 refugees were on board, but Canadian authorities are unsure of their identities, Toews said.
Some of the people on the ship are “suspected human smugglers and terrorists,” he said.
Toews pledged that Canada would prosecute anyone involved in human trafficking, which he denounced as a “despicable crime.”
Canada and other Western nations have been critical of Sri Lanka’s human rights record, but consider the Tamil Tigers — known for their suicide bombings and child soldiers — a terrorist organization.
The Sri Lankan military crushed the Tigers in a bloody campaign last year, ending a 37-year civil war, but triggering concerns abroad over alleged human rights abuses.
Canada has one of the world’s most welcoming asylum policies and has a politically active Tamil community, which has urged their adopted country to grant asylum to the boat people.
In a similar incident in October last year, 76 Tamil refugees arrived on a ship to Canada where they were held but eventually released after none were determined to belong to the Tamil Tigers.
“We are optimistic that the Canadian government will do the same thing again,” said Manjula Selvarajah of the Canadian Tamil Congress.
“The idea of security, it’s very important to us as well. We are Canadian as well,” she said.
She also hinted that the accusations that the refugees were linked to the Tamil Tigers came from the Sri Lankan government.
Sri Lankan High Commissioner Chitranganee Wagiswara — the equivalent of an ambassador among Commonwealth nations — said that the ship was a “human smuggling operation managed by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.”
In Washington, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said that US authorities had monitored the ship to prepare for any eventuality. Media reports said the ship headed across the Pacific after being dissuaded from docking in Australia.
Tents were set up to accommodate the Sri Lankans once they dock near a naval base on Vancouver Island, which lies just off the mainland metropolis.
A vacant emergency ward has been set aside in Victoria General Hospital for “triage, screening and diagnostics,” hospital spokeswoman Shannon Marshall said.
Healthy migrants will be released back to federal authorities, said Marshall, “while those who require further care will be admitted to an area of the hospital that will be kept separate from the general population.”
A missing fingertip offers a clue to Mako Nishimura’s criminal past as one of Japan’s few female yakuza, but after clawing her way out of the underworld, she now spends her days helping other retired gangsters reintegrate into society. The multibillion-dollar yakuza organized crime network has long ruled over Japan’s drug rings, illicit gambling dens and sex trade. In the past few years, the empire has started to crumble as members have dwindled and laws targeting mafia are tightened. An intensifying police crackdown has shrunk yakuza forces nationwide, with their numbers dipping below 20,000 last year for the first time since records
EXTRADITION FEARS: The legislative changes come five years after a treaty was suspended in response to the territory’s crackdown on democracy advocates Exiled Hong Kong dissidents said they fear UK government plans to restart some extraditions with the territory could put them in greater danger, adding that Hong Kong authorities would use any pretext to pursue them. An amendment to UK extradition laws was passed on Tuesday. It came more than five years after the UK and several other countries suspended extradition treaties with Hong Kong in response to a government crackdown on the democracy movement and its imposition of a National Security Law. The British Home Office said that the suspension of the treaty made all extraditions with Hong Kong impossible “even if
CAUSE UNKNOWN: Weather and runway conditions were suitable for flight operations at the time of the accident, and no distress signal was sent, authorities said A cargo aircraft skidded off the runway into the sea at Hong Kong International Airport early yesterday, killing two ground crew in a patrol car, in one of the worst accidents in the airport’s 27-year history. The incident occurred at about 3:50am, when the plane is suspected to have lost control upon landing, veering off the runway and crashing through a fence, the Airport Authority Hong Kong said. The jet hit a security patrol car on the perimeter road outside the runway zone, which then fell into the water, it said in a statement. The four crew members on the plane, which
Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its junior partner yesterday signed a coalition deal, paving the way for Sanae Takaichi to become the nation’s first female prime minister. The 11th-hour agreement with the Japan Innovation Party (JIP) came just a day before the lower house was due to vote on Takaichi’s appointment as the fifth prime minister in as many years. If she wins, she will take office the same day. “I’m very much looking forward to working with you on efforts to make Japan’s economy stronger, and to reshape Japan as a country that can be responsible for future generations,”
RSS