Global Courant 2023-05-17 15:14:00
Several ships and planes searched for 39 missing people on Wednesday after a Chinese fishing boat capsized in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
China’s state broadcaster CCTV said the accident happened around 3am on Tuesday. The report said the crew includes 17 from China, 17 from Indonesia and five from the Philippines.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang have ordered Chinese diplomats abroad, as well as the ministries of Agriculture and Transport, to help search for survivors.
“All-out efforts” must be made in the rescue operation, Xi was quoted by the official Xinhua News Agency. Li ordered unspecified measures to “reduce the number of casualties and strengthen the safety management of fishing vessels at sea to ensure safe maritime transport and production,” Xinhua said.
There was no word on the cause of the capsize.
Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines have also agreed to join the search. Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency said the capsizing occurred about 4,600 kilometers (2,900 mi) northwest of Australia.
Several ships and an Australian Defense Force P-8A Poseidon aircraft searched the area. The Indian Ocean stretches from South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula to East Africa and Western Australia. No survivors or life rafts were spotted.
The Philippine Coast Guard command center said Wednesday it is monitoring the situation and coordinating with the Chinese embassy in Manila, as well as search and rescue teams operating near the ship’s last known location.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority said it was coordinating the search at what it called a remote location in the Indian Ocean about 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles) northwest of the coastal city of Perth. It said the service received a distress beacon signal from the fishing vessel at about 5:30 a.m. Tuesday and that weather conditions in the area were “extreme” on Tuesday but had improved by Wednesday.
Along the Bay of Bengal, on the northern side of the Indian Ocean, Myanmar and Bangladesh were recovering from a powerful cyclone that battered their coastlines, causing widespread destruction and at least 21 deaths, with hundreds more missing.
Merchant and fishing vessels in the area also searched for survivors on Wednesday.
A Perth-based Challenger rescue aircraft will drop a buoy to assist with drift modeling to further aid the search, the agency said.
The search covered an area virtually in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The capsized hull was spotted and the transmitter detected more than 1,000 kilometers (620 mi) south of Sri Lanka, with the nearest port appearing to be the Maldives archipelago about 500 kilometers (310 mi) north of the search area.
The Lu Peng Yuan Yu 028 was based in the eastern coastal province of Shandong and operated by Penglai Jinglu Fishery Co. Ltd., according to the reports. Another Chinese vessel, Lu Peng Yuan Yu 018, is operating near the upturned hull and has been asked to search for survivors, the Indonesian agency said.
Wang Wenbin, spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, said additional rescue equipment was on its way to the crime scene.
“We will continue to take all possible measures with all parties to search for and rescue the missing persons. The Chinese side thanks the Australian Maritime Search and Rescue Department for quickly dispatching aircraft and coordinating passing foreign vessels to participate in the search and rescue operations,” Wang told reporters at a daily briefing Wednesday.
China is believed to operate the largest fishing fleet in the world. Many of them remain at sea for months or even years at a time, supported by Chinese maritime security services and an extensive network of support vessels.
According to a report released in 2021 by a Norway-based watchdog group that tapped into growing concerns about lack of fish from Chinese squid fishermen, they have been documented using wide nets to illegally catch already overfished tuna as part of a wave of unregulated activity in the Indian Ocean. of international cooperation for the protection of marine species on the high seas.
The group, called Trygg Mat Tracking, found that the number of squid vessels in the high seas of the Indian Ocean – where fishing for the species is unregulated – has increased sixfold since 2016.
The US Coast Guard was also involved in a dangerous confrontation with Chinese vessels off Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands in 2022 during a mission to inspect the vessels for signs of illegal, unreported or unregulated fishing.
Chinese fishing vessels operating illegally have been known to sail ‘dark’, with their mandatory tracking device indicating a vessel’s position either turned off, transmitting intermittently, or with false identifications.
In 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was reported to have crashed somewhere in the Indian Ocean with 239 people on board. That Boeing 777, which is still missing, became invisible to civilian radar when the transponder locator stopped transmitting during a flight from Kuala Lumpur.
