Navy nabs 54 illegal immigrants

CHAMIKARA WEERASINGHE

The Navy stopped a human smuggling attempt off the coast of Galle yesterday morning netting 54 Sri Lankans illegally bound for Australia.

Navy spokesman Commodore Kosala Warnakulasuriya said the illegal migrants were arrested on board a fishing boat.

Navy surveillance units spotted them while trying to set off from Weligama.

“This is the first time that a boat with illegal migrants to Australia was caught in this region this year,” he said and added that the number of incidents involving Sri Lankans trying to illegally enter Australia plummeted since the forming of the Sri Lanka-Australia Joint Committee to prevent human smuggling and transnational crime between the two countries.

“We nabbed a boat with 54 illegal migrants, of them 51 are Tamils and three Sinhalese,” he said.

“We used to encounter boats with hundreds of illegal migrants almost on a daily basis during last year. Illegal migrant attempts have reduced this year ,” he said.

The reason for this is that the Navy has not only increased its units on patrolling and surveillance against human smuggling attempts, but also its intelligence units to arrest those who run this operation, he said. “We have sufficient units and facilities to detect illegal migrant attempts made by boats. We know how they operate,” he said.