Five Lankans lost amid big sharks

Five Sri Lankan asylum seekers who swam for help after their Australia-bound boat ran out of fuel and food hundreds of kilometres off the coast may have been eaten by sharks. The crew of a carrier that came to the rescue of the Sri Lankans’ boat, adrift almost 300 kilometres west of the Cocos Islands, said huge sharks swarmed around them.

“They were circling our vessel and at the same time they were circling the (refugee) vessel,” Smarven Demegillo, the third officer of the merchant vessel Postojna, said. “They were very big sharks.”

Demegillo said his crew abandoned attempts to transfer the asylum seekers to the freighter, fearing they would fall in among the sharks.

He said the Slovenian rescuers were horrified to hear from the 59 survivors that five others had already left the 18-metre vessel to swim for help with nothing more than life jackets and inner tubes.

Home Affairs Minister, Brendan O’Connor, said that Australian authorities became aware the Sri Lankan vessel was in distress after the Australian Maritime Safety Authority received an anonymous phone call from London on April 30.

But the government is resisting demands for a public inquiry into the disappearance of the five. The remaining 59 will be taken to Christmas Island, where immigration officials would interview them, and extra federal police have been deployed to aid investigations.

“If it is established that the passengers are missing, presumed perished at sea, the matter will be reported to the West Australian coroner,” O’Connor said.

Amid falling public support for the government, including its handling of asylum seekers, the opposition, the Greens and an independent senator demanded an inquiry.

“Obviously something is not working right when we know a boat was there and two weeks later five people are dead,” the Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young said, calling for a review of boat monitoring and interception procedures.