Summary
Around 140 Rohingya refugees had been trapped on the wooden fishing boat, floating off the coast of Indonesia. These children, women and men had fled Bangladesh and their homeland of Myanmar in a bid to escape violence and terror, only to face the same horrors with a crew that seemed to delight in their dread.
The disaster is the latest in a string of tragedies to befall the Rohingya, a stateless Muslim minority. Last year, 4,500 Rohingya — two-thirds of them women and children — fled Myanmar and Bangladesh by boat. Of those, 569 died or went missing while crossing the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea.
Rohingya refugees were told they would have to board an Indonesian fishing boat. The boat would then take them the rest of the way to Indonesia. From there, the passengers would be smuggled into neighboring Malaysia. The women and girls could not speak Indonesian and could not understand their demands.
The captain and crew had been drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana, the passengers say. The women and girls refused. The crew kicked and punched them. But believing the crew was armed, they say, they were powerless to stop them. The sun was rising again, along with the passengers’ desperation.
Amin knew they had to keep the vessel stable if they had any hope of surviving. The crew, meanwhile, wanted to be anywhere but the boat. Amin feared that if rescuers found them on the boat without a crew, the passengers would be blamed for the disaster.
The boat capsized again on March 20. The bodies of 12 women and three children were recovered from the waters off Aceh. The search for more has been called off. On April 2, police announced they had arrested three members of the crew, plus a fourth man who was not on board the boat.
Police are still searching for the remaining crew, including the captain, whose mobile phone activity places him in Malaysia. They were charged with people smuggling, which carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison. Police are not considering murder charges, Kirana says, because they believe the capsize was an accident.
While the general story's tone is too appealing to emotions to not recognize that it is just a made up garbage, this line kind of gives it away even earlier.
Do we have to believe that the crew will abandon their (relatively expensive by Indonesian standards) fishing boat just to rape some unwashed refugees? Do you think the captain in question has a whole fleet of boats and sinks one whenever he wants to have sex?
This BS will only fly for a certain gynocratic Western audience, conditioned from the childhood that a hairy hole is the end of everything and the greatest value ever obtainable.
You make valid point, because at the end of the day we only have the word of the survivors to go off that people would try to benefit from for what ever their cause may be.
If the captain was truly this drunk, it wouldn't surprise if he just did something stupid, like kicking at the first thing in front of him, that he wouldn't have done otherwise. People have historically done incredibly stupid things while drunk, especially so drunk you are struggling to stand.