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By Allan Dowd
VANCOUVER (Reuters) - More Chinese boat people were discovered wandering on an isolated island on Canada's Pacific coast Thursday, a day after being forced to swim ashore in frigid water from the ship on which they had been smuggled, officials said.
The four men, according to a local news account, had been told by the smugglers there was a highway on the nearly unpopulated island that they could walk to.
They were with a group of about 130 immigrants, including young children, dropped off Wednesday at the southern tip of the Queen Charlotte Islands.
The four were picked up by emergency crews and airlifted to a hospital, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
It was the second time in less than an month that a boatload of people from China has been dropped on the British Columbia coast.
Most of the recent group was rescued Wednesday. They were transported to the Victoria area Thursday and are being processed as possible refugees. The boat on which they arrived was discovered Monday in international waters. It was seized Wednesday after it dumped its human cargo.
Accounts of the landing on the southern tip of the Queen Charlotte Islands describe people swimming and wading through rough seas to a steep rocky shore where they perched until rescuers arrived. Early reports put the numbers at about 150 although that number has since been revised to roughly 130.
No deaths have been reported in the incident, but authorities who arrived almost immediately were so worried about the situation they had emergency supplies airdropped before removing the immigrants from the area by boat.
Mounties discovered the four stragglers in a follow-up search of the drop-off area on the Queen Charlotte chain's Kunghit Island, which is about 800 km northwest of Vancouver. The rugged island is only accessible by boat or airplane.
``We did not have an exact count of the people off-loaded and we wanted confirm that there wasn't anyone who was scared or confused and had hidden or run off or anything,'' Constable Tracey Rook told Reuters.
Officials said they did not know yet if the people will claim refugee status, as the 123 on board a similar boat did after arriving in July at an isolated bay on Vancouver Island.
``Right now our priority has been to organize such a large group of people in a fairly remote are and get them to the place where they will be housed and sheltered,'' spokeswoman Lois Reimer of the Citizenship and Immigration Department, told a radio interviewer.
The smugglers' boat, a 50-meter (yard) former driftnet fishing vessel believed to be from South Korea, was seized by Canada several hours after it dropped off the immigrants, officials said.
Eight crew members on board the boat have been arrested. They face charges both for human smuggling and over the way the immigrants were sent to shore. Authorities do not know the boat's exact origin or original destination on the Canadian coast.
Canadian and U.S. authorities have been on the alert in recent months for boat people from Asia, following accounts of several landings in Australia -- which has since toughened its immigration laws.
Reimer said authorities were not aware of any additional boats headed to Canada. ``Absolutely we're on the alert, but to say we know one is coming tomorrow, absolutely we do not,'' she told CKNW Radio in Vancouver.
Authorities believe most of the smuggling boats are operated by Asian organized crime gangs, who sometimes charge the immigrants more than $40,000 to make the journey -- usually crammed into the holds of dilapidated fishing vessels.
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