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Thursday, August 12, 1999

Dramatic chase on the high seas
The latest discovery of a suspicious-looking trawler triggered alarms across the country

Marina Jimenez, Adrienne Tanner and Drew Hasselback
National Post, with files from The Canadian Press


Mystery ship


Landfall

Chuck Stoody, The Canadian Press
Coast guard ships search for a mystery ship, which carried 150 illegal migrants to Canada.

Major Jim Benninger had just finished toasting a sandwich in the belly of his long-range Aurora military aircraft when a rusty fishing trawler turned up on his radar screen.

It was about 3 o'clock Monday afternoon, about 240-km north of the Queen Charlotte Islands, off the northwest coast of British Columbia.

Initially, the blip on the screen looked like all the others -- just a dot telling the surveillance team that something was in the water.

But the pilot of the Aurora reported from the cockpit that the 100-foot-long fishing boat bobbing in international waters looked suspicious.

"It looked like it had some large water containers on deck, which is completely unusual," Maj. Benninger said. The ship carried no flag and no name. There was writing on the ship's bow, but it was impossible to make out the words through the rust.

Maj. Benninger directed the plane to pass over the ship and photograph it. Then they turned back to their base at CFB Comox, hoping they hadn't aroused the suspicions of the vessel's operators.

On the way back, at about 3:15 p.m., the Aurora radioed the Maritime Pacific Command Centre in Esquimalt, setting in motion a complicated series of phone calls that went all the way to the office of Canada's newly-appointed immigration minister.

The fan-out list included calls to the Department of National Defence, which then alerted the Canadian Coast Guard, Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Jim Redmond, a Citizenship and Immigration official in Victoria.

Two coast guard vessels in the area, the Tanu and Arrow Post, were put on alert and told to be ready to intercept the ship once it reached Canadian waters.

Maj. Benninger and his nine-member crew from 407 Squadron of the Canadian air force usually spend their days visually inspecting traffic in the ocean beneath them. Only six weeks earlier, the same crew photographed a ship which military and immigration officials suspect sank after unloading its human cargo somewhere along the remote northern shoreline. Then, late last month, another rust-pocked fishing boat with 123 refugee claimants from China floated into a remote bay on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

As a result the Canadian military recently tailored its coastal watch program to target boats that might be smuggling ashore migrants from China. They now focus on the "great circle route" from Asia to Canada, and look for telltale signs of smuggling vessels: loitering, stopping, a lack of markings or fishing equipment.

The mystery ship they picked up this week was guilty on all counts.

From Monday afternoon until Tuesday morning, the ship circled back and forth in the white-capped waves for 20 hours, finally moving toward Canadian shores at 11:15 a.m. Tuesday, when it came within 60 nautical miles of the Queen Charlotte Islands, an archipelago of picturesque islands known for its rocky cliffs and isolated, storm-swept beaches.

By then, the ship had adopted an erratic, unsteady path, going north and then south, approaching Canada in a zig-zag. "It was not coming at a steady pace, it was kind of odd," said George Varnai, regional director for Citizenship and Immigration Canada.

The Tanu, a 50-metre vessel with 32 sleeping berths, and the Arrow Post, were sent to the west coast of the Queen Charlottes.

By mid-afternoon Tuesday, government bureaucrats and enforcement officials began moving into the area, preparing for the expected boatload of illegal Asian migrants. Twelve immigration officials, seven RCMP officers, and physicians flew to the isolated communities of Sandspit and Queen Charlotte City. The immigration officers climbed on board the Tanu, and joined in efforts to track the renegade ship, which was by then heading east and thought to be carrying human cargo.

The Inkster, the RCMP's white, high-speed aluminum catamaran, was also on scene, with three RCMP officers and its four-member emergency response team.

Officials hoped to make contact with the ship Tuesday evening, and prepared to hail the vessel and warn the captain about the consequences of entering Canadian jurisdiction with illegal human cargo. However, heavy cloud, fog and choppy seas stalled their efforts, and in the end, they decided not to hail the ship's captain because they didn't want to tip their hand, and let the ship's officers know they were being monitored.

Yesterday, the crisis came to a sudden and dramatic end. The rusted trawler somehow evaded the parade of officials who were monitoring its progress. Although it remained visible on radar, the fog and high seas prevented officials from boarding the ship before it dropped its passengers.

Sometime yesterday morning, the vessel arrived on the cold, wet beaches of remote Gilbert Bay, on Kunghit Island, the southern-most island in the Queen Charlotte chain. It dumped its load of 150 children, men and children less than 50 metres from the shore, and then headed back out to sea. The migrants had lifejackets but no lifeboats, and had to swim through the icy, rough sea. They moved quickly; more than 20 minutes in the water would have caused hypothermia.

The Inkster and the two coast guard vessels were close enough to pursue the ship. At 12:45 p.m., the Aurora aircraft advised the runaway vessel to turn around. RCMP officers then boarded the ship, which was by then in international waters, between 70 and 100 km from the shore.

Canadian authorities were confident they had the legal right to seize control of the ship and arrest its eight Korean operators, who are believed to have committed a criminal offence.

The ship's passengers, who are all from the People's Republic of China, appeared tired and wet, but otherwise in good health. Immigration officials planned to transport them to Port Hardy and then onto CFB Esquimalt, where they will housed in the same gymnasium as the last group of 123 Chinese migrants.

 
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