Canadian navy escorting Lankan refugee ship into B.C.
August 12, 2010 08:17 am
A suspected Lankan Tamil migrant boat now believed to hold as many as 500 refugees
has entered
“We expect it will land either late (Thursday) evening or early Friday morning,” a senior federal official said Wednesday of the Thai-flagged ship, the MV Sun Sea.
While Canadian Navy and Coast Guard authorities would neither confirm nor
deny the whereabouts of the vessel Wednesday, US Coast Guard Commander Mark
McCadden said that the 188-ft cargo ship had been spotted approximately 300
miles off the coast of
The vessel was met by a Canadian navy ship from Canadian Forces Base
Esquimalt when it reached
The Tamil ship is thought to be engaged in “human smuggling and human
trafficking, which is obviously a very dangerous thing,” the federal official
said, adding that
The government fears other migrant ships may be on the way, the federal official said.
“We are becoming a target of human smugglers and human traffickers,” he said.
“We are looking to send a message to these people who are usually (part of) criminal organizations, in some cases with possible terrorist connections in the case of the Tamil Tigers...that we are not going to allow our laws to be broken.”
On Tuesday, news of the
On Wednesday, however, BC Corrections spokesman Jess Gunnarson said that he had heard reports that there were now as many as 500 Tamils on-board the ship.
Gunnarson said that housing as many as 300 additional migrants would not pose a problem for the province’s corrections system.
“We have a longstanding formal agreement with the federal government and if you look back to the past decade, we certainly have a lot of experience in meeting that demand when migrant ships arrive. So certainly we’ll meet the demand as it’s required,” he said.
While the Metro Vancouver prisons prepare to house the Tamil migrants for an
unknown but likely extended time, in the short-term,
In addition, a former emergency ward at the hospital will be used to treat
the migrants, all of whom have been on board the ship since it left the
It is expected the vessel will be escorted to either Ogden Point, normally used by cruise ships near Victoria’s downtown and where a similar ship was towed last year, or to CFB Esquimalt.
In October 2009, the MV Ocean Lady arrived in
Most of those migrants now live in
Canadian media reports