Indonesian police reported Wednesday that Australia had repatriated dozens of illegal migrants to a remote southern island after intercepting their vessel at sea, marking at least the second such incident this year.
According to Mardiono, police chief of Indonesia’s Rote Island, the migrants arrived last month aboard two boats they claimed they were coerced onto following an Australian interception of their wooden craft.
Initial reports indicated a vessel had run aground.
“After we checked, we found a boat made from aluminum, without a name and without a flag,” he said, adding it was carrying 22 people.
Later that day, police found a similar vessel carrying another 22 men that had run aground on a different part of the island.
Mardiono said most of the men identified themselves as Bangladeshis and included eight Rohingya from Myanmar. They were in custody at local police headquarters.
He said they claimed to have spent three days at sea before being intercepted by an Australian vessel.
They said they were detained for 18 days before being put aboard two boats and told to head to Rote Island, he added.
Their claims could not be independently verified.
But, an Australian Border Force (ABF) spokesperson told Agence France-Presse (AFP) in a statement that it “does not confirm or comment on operational matters.”
In June, Indonesian immigration authorities said in a statement that they detained 28 foreigners stranded on a beach in southern Java who said they had been set adrift after being intercepted by Australian authorities.
Under a hard-line policy introduced more than a decade ago, Australia has sent thousands of migrants attempting to reach the country by boat to detention centers on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island and the tiny Pacific nation of Nauru.
Successive Australian governments have vowed that no asylum-seeker arriving by boat will ever be allowed to settle in the country permanently.
