Migrant ship sinks off Indonesia; over 200 missing

Rescuers battled high waves Sunday as they searched for 200 asylum seekers still missing after their wooden ship sank off Indonesia's main island of Java. So far only 33 people have been plucked alive from the choppy waters alive.              

Survivors told authorities they had been trying to reach Australia, said Lt. Alwi Mudzakir, a maritime police official who was heading rescue operations.               

He blamed Saturday's accident on overloading, saying the vessel  packed with 250 men, women and children from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Turkey  appeared to have been carrying more than twice its capacity.                

When the boat became unsteady 20 miles (32 kilometers) off Java's coast, people started panicking, causing it two sway violently back and forth, until finally it capsized.             

Indonesia, a sprawling archipelagic nation of 240 million people, has more than 18,000 islands and thousands of miles (kilometers) of unpatrolled coastline, making it a key transit point for smuggling migrants.                

Those on the ship that sank Saturday had passed through the capital, Jakarta, three days earlier without any legal immigration documents, according to police.               

An unidentified group loaded them onto four buses and brought them to a port, promising to get them to Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean.              

One of the survivors, Esmat Adine, told the official news agency Antara that when the ship started to rock, triggering the panic, people were so tightly packed they had nowhere to go. "That made the boat even more unstable, and eventually it sank," said the 24-year-old Afghan migrant, adding that he and others survived by clinging to parts of the broken vessel until they were picked up by local fishermen.

AP