|
|
| Home - My Yahoo! - Help |  |
| | |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |||
Wednesday January 5 7:08 AM ET
VANCOUVER (CP) - For two weeks, 25 Chinese men discovered aboard a cargo ship Monday were locked inside two canvas-covered containers buried beneath thousands of tonnes of other cargo.
The men, who were en route to Seattle when they were discovered at the Port of Vancouver on Monday, had garbage cans for toilets. They had battery-operated fans and lights and small mattresses to sleep on. Their food was beginning to spoil and the air was fetid in the two containers which are about the size of semi-trailers.
"The people were in very good condition," said Rob Johnston, manager of Immigration's Vancouver enforcement office.
"They had very good clothing and appeared very neat and in very good health inside the containers."
The men, who are in custody at the Vancouver pre-trial centre, will undergo medical checks, he said.
The 25 men, including four juveniles under 18, were discovered aboard the California Jupiter after Citizenship and Immigration Canada were tipped by American authorities. The Japanese-owned ship is registered in Liberia.
Initial interviews are under way, but Johnston said the men are expected to make refugee claims.
The passengers told officials they boarded the ship Dec. 19 and it left Hong Kong on Dec. 20 headed for Seattle after a stop in Taiwan.
The ship was diverted to Vancouver when the Seattle port, where the containers were to be offloaded, was too full.
RCMP spokesman Grant Learned said the migrants' destination was not Canada.
Canada Customs had only a one-hour notice of its arrival, said director Mike McWhinney.
"We weren't ready for the ship," he said at a news conference Tuesday. "We didn't have a full complement of trained inspectors (Sunday night). . .We couldn't do anything more on Sunday night except a very preliminary look."
The stowaways weren't found until 53 containers were hauled off the ship and the side-by-side containers were inspected in the cargo hold Monday.
The shipping agent, New Jersey-based agent NYK Line North America was fined $375,000 for the incident. It is the largest penalty ever handed out by Canada Immigration.
The fine was paid and the ship was cleared to leave the Port of Vancouver Tuesday. Calls to NYK were not returned.
The California Jupiter was one of three ships recently caught with Chinese nationals hiding in such cargo containers.
Twelve illegal Chinese migrants aboard the OOCL Faith in Seattle were arrested on Sunday.
Another 18 apparent illegal immigrants were detained in Long Beach, Calif., Sunday in a container aboard a ship that had docked in Vancouver before going to California.
One man told immigration officials he paid $60,000 US to be transported aboard the California Jupiter.
"This is part of a troubling trend," U.S. Immigration and Naturalization spokeswoman Virginia Kice told the Associated Press.
"Some of these ships have over 1,000 containers. It is, in a sense, like looking for a needle in a haystack."
Canada Customs processes about one million marine cargo containers in Canada each year.
Customs' target is to inspect three per cent of those. Last year they inspected 2.5 per cent at the Port of Vancouver.
"Obviously they can't look in every one," said port authority spokeswoman Linda Morris. "I know they check as many as they certainly can, as many as is reasonable.
"Obviously they knew to look this time."
In her five years at the port authority, Morris said only a handful of stowaways have been discovered. Never has it been such a large group.
"We haven't had anything like this," she said.
Morris said the journey must have been difficult for the 25 men who are now in Immigration custody.
"It's not a very pleasant thing," she said. "It's not a very big space. It would be pretty tough."
Learned said there is no doubt there was an organized group behind this latest human smuggling incident.
"But it doesn't have the same connotations as the migrant arrivals that we had this summer where you had individual ships that were laden with individuals coming into the West Coast of Canada," Learned said.
Almost 600 people from China's Fujian province arrived in four decrepit cargo ships off the B.C. coast.
Dominic Taddeo, president and chief executive of the Montreal Port Authority, said stowaways are an unfortunate fact of life.
"People in life do things that are not right and they manage to get people on board ships that shouldn't be there," Taddeo said Tuesday.
"The precautions are there but it happens."
He said the stowaway problem is worldwide and ports of arrival can only do so much.
He said sufficient security has to be in place "at the port of departure."
Reform Immigration critic Leon Benoit blamed the federal government.
Refugee claims should be dealt with in days and weeks, he said, and those whose claims are rejected should be quickly removed.
"If you take the profit out of the crime, it will stop," he said. "This government, through its weak leadership, is rolling out the red carpet for smugglers."
Immigration Minister Elinor Caplan could not be reached for comment.
The majority of the migrants made refugee claims and their claims are being processed.
Only two of 144 claims dealt with so far have been successful, while 71 have been denied.
There are Canada-wide arrests warrants out for dozens of migrants who were released from the first ship that arrived, and their refugee claims have been declared abandoned.
Since that initial release no more migrants have been released from custody. © The Canadian Press, 2000
| | |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|