Sri Lanka’s navy says it has rescued 102 people who are believed to be Rohingya refugees from a fishing trawler which was adrift in the Indian Ocean for days.
Navy spokesman Gayan Wickramasuriya said fishermen spotted the boat off Sri Lanka’s northern coast on Thursday and raised alarm to authorities who then rescued the people on board.
Passengers included 25 children and 30 women, with those on board all escorted from the trawler to a naval base on Sri Lanka’s east coast where they were given medical care, food and water.
Videos shared on social media show a wooden fishing trawler packed with children, women and men being approached by a speedboat.
#Rohingya fleeing #Myanmar saved and brought to land by #Tamil fishermen from the #Mullaitivu waters were taken by the @srilanka_navy to #SriLanka’s eastern #Trincomalee port aboard the same run down vessel the refugees were found.@Refugees @RefugeesIntl pic.twitter.com/xyQbaT6Nfj
— LankaFiles (@lankafiles) December 19, 2024
Those on board appeared frail after days spent at sea, lying on the deck of the vessel with some hiding under umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun.
The navy is yet to confirm the identities of refugees due to communication difficulties but believes they are Rohingya who might have been travelling from Myanmar.
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas, a Muslim minority group, have fled Myanmar in recent years to escape a brutal crackdown by Myanmar’s military. The United Nations has described the conditions in Myanmar as a ”textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.
The boat ran out of food and water before it came near to the shore in Mullaitivu District, on the north-eastern coast of Sri Lanka’s northernmost province.
The police said they were investigating the circumstances of the arrival of the boat and assessing the condition of the people on the vessel.
Around one million Rohingya Muslims are living in overcrowded refugee camps in southern Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar. Most of them fled a brutal counterinsurgency campaign in 2017 by Myanmar’s security forces, who were accused of committing mass rapes and killings.
More have crossed the border on foot or through sea routes after the military junta overthrew Myanmar’s democratically elected government in 2021.
Neighbouring Indonesia, which says it has witnessed a spike in refugee arrivals since November, has called on the international community for help.
In October, a wooden boat with 140 Rohingya Muslims, mostly women and children, anchored about 1 mile (0.60km) off the coast of Indonesia’s northernmost province of Aceh. Three of the Rohingya on board died during the nearly two-week-long trip from Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh to the waters off Labuhan Haji in South Aceh district, local police said.
