Chinese survivors from a boat that sank near a Cambodian island, killing three people and leaving eight missing, said they embarked on what they believed would be a short-term fishing job and ended up without food and water aboard the vessel, and their belongings were taken away.
Cambodian authorities said on Friday they rescued 21 people one day after the boat small wooden fishing vessel sank near Koh Tang, a Cambodian island close to the maritime border with Vietnam.
Nine more people were rescued by the Vietnamese and three bodies were recovered by Cambodia, leaving eight people still missing, Preah Sihanouk provincial spokesman Kheang Phearom said on Facebook on Saturday.
Photo: AP
Survivors told Cambodian officials that they began their journey in southern China.
Video footage showed a Cambodian crew on a nearby boat tossing life jackets and life-saving buoys toward the ramshackle vessel as it slowly listed to the right and slipped below the surface, sending its passengers spilling into the water.
Two Cambodian crew members abandoned the boat when it first got into trouble and were rescued earlier. Cambodian police described them as guides and put them under arrest.
It was not clear why the passengers were being brought to Cambodia, although the account given by survivors suggests they were tricked by human traffickers who sometimes lure people with false offers of lucrative jobs. They then force them into activities such as scams or prostitution, and offer them freedom only in exchange for large amounts of money.
The passengers had set off from China’s Guangdong Province on Sept. 11 on a speedboat and had been transferred to the fishing boat on Sept. 17 in international waters, Preah Sihanouk provincial police chief General Chuon Narin said.
Two survivors, a man and a woman who were being treated in the Preah Sihanouk provincial hospital, recounted parts of their ordeal on Saturday to journalists.
Zhu Pingfan, 41, said he had expected to earn between 10,000 and 20,000 yuan (US$1,400 to US$2,800) for about 10 days of fishing.
“We boarded the boat and all of our belongings and electronics were confiscated. I thought it was not a big deal, right? So I handed them over,” he said.
“Then after about three days, there was no food left. On day four, there was nothing to drink. So for about four days we did not have anything to eat or drink,” he said.
Huang Qian, 20, told a similar story and recalled how they were moved to a second boat, where each was given two packets of instant noodles and nothing more.
The situation turned even grimmer when water got into the engine, disabling the vessel. There were no life jackets aboard when she had to abandon the boat.
“I floated on the open sea for about two days,” she said. “We had a cooler and the two of us were just sitting on the cooler and floating around, and then we saw a fishing boat, so we called for help. So they tossed a rope to us.”
Cambodian authorities have been cracking down on human-trafficking networks following widespread reports of people from other Southeast Asian countries being tricked into migrating.
UN Office on Drugs and Crime regional representative Jeremy Douglas said that the stretch of coastline has long been a notorious trafficking route for timber and drugs.
“I don’t think the [criminal] networks are going to pause,” he said. “But I think the authorities are going to take this more seriously because there is a lot of focus and attention.”
Additional reporting by AFP
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS