Many feared Dead As Asylum Seeker Boat Crashes Off Australian Island

Up to 50 people are feared dead or missing after a fishing boat full of asylum-seekers crashed into cliffs near an island off the west Australian coast today.



Television footage of the horrific incident showed the boat, carrying about 70 people, ramming bow first onto the rocks, splintering and then rapidly sinking.



The passengers including women and children were thrown from the boat on to the razor-sharp rocks below.



The screams of the people in the water could be clearly heard by residents on Christmas Island as the navy rescue mission got underway. Two inflatable rafts were used; however it is thought that attempts to recover people from the water were hampered by the difficult weather conditions.



The boat, which is believed to have set off from Indonesia, was carrying about 70 asylum seekers of which were thought mainly to be Iranians and Iraqis.



Wayne Swan, the Australian Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister, said 27 bodies had been recovered and 41 rescued, but warned the toll could rise.



A number of people were rescued in the aftermath of the incident. 'It is heart-stopping,' said one resident who saw people struggling in the wild sea. 'It's carnage, a terrible tragedy.



'The sea is awash. None of us can get out to rescue them from the shore. It took a customs boat ages to get to them.'



Christmas Island councillor Kamar Ismail told of the carnage, saying: 'It was horrific, mate. I saw a person dying in front of me and there was nothing we could do to save them.



'Babies, children maybe three or four years old, they were hanging on to bits of timber, they were screaming 'help, help, help', we were throwing life jackets out to them but many of them couldn't swim a few metres to reach them.



'The waves just kept on coming and smashed everything.



Residents of Christmas Island did their best to help the struggling people. Resident Michael Foster, who joined in the rescue effort, said: 'By the time I got down there and saw what was going on, there was debris and people everywhere with life jackets on and so forth but a lot of screaming the carrying on.



'With the horrendous seas as they are, the only thing that people could do from the mainland was really throw life jackets back into the water or just advise them to swim away from the rocks.'



Conditions were so bad that a Royal Australian Navy ship that had picked up asylum seekers from an earlier boat arrival this week was unable to reach the island to drop them off.



It is the third deadly incident involving boats trying to reach Christmas Island in the past decade. Last year, five Afghan refugees died when their boat exploded off Ashmore Reef, near Christmas Island, injuring 30 others. In 2001 the Siev X fishing boat sank just south of the Indonesian island of Java with 400 people onboard. A total of 353 people perished.