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Australia says 2 fishermen rescued; report 18 lost
By ROD McGUIRK,Associated Press Writer AP - 1 hour 2 minutes ago
CANBERRA, Australia - Two men were found floating in an ice box in the seas off Australia and told authorities they had spent 25 days adrift after their fishing boat sank with the loss of 18 other crew members, an official said Tuesday.
The pair, citizens of the Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar in their 20s, were rescued from the Torres Strait by a helicopter Saturday and flown to a hospital on Thursday Island off the coast of Queensland state, Maritime Safety Authority spokeswoman Tracey Jiggins said.
Both men stood in the pink ice box which has waist-high sides and waved when they were spotted by a customs border protection patrol flight.
The men told police they had been aboard a 30-foot (9-meter) wooden fishing boat that sank Dec. 23 with a total of 20 crew from Thailand and Myanmar, which is also known as Burma.
Jiggins said the men found refuge inside a large insulated box that held ice on the boat. "At the time of the sinking, the two survivors also witnessed other crew in the water with no flotation devises," she said.
She did not know what the men ate or drank during their ordeal.
One of the rescuers, pilot Terry Gadenne, told Seven Network television that each man drank about four pints of water within seconds of being hoisted aboard the helicopter.
An official at the hospital, Dr. Oscar Whitehead, said the men were in good condition and would be discharged into the care of immigration authorities later Tuesday. He said their greatest medical problem had been dehydration.
An immigration department official said the men had been interviewed and the department expected to confirm their identities within a few days.
The official, who declined to be named citing department policy, said the department would also "determine their intentions."
She would not elaborate, but the government guards coastal waters against people smugglers and well as illegal fishers.
Jiggins said it was not clear whether the boat sank in Australian or Indonesian waters. Indonesian authorities had been advised of the sinking, she said.
Officials did not know why the fishing boat sank, Jiggins said, but the two men said the vessel had been taking on water for some time before it went down.
The survivors were not able to provide accurate details of where the boat sank, Jiggins said. She said Australian authorities did not plan to search for other survivors.
"We've made an assessment ... that the remaining crew members would not be able to survive 25 days in the water without any form of flotation devise," Jiggins said.
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