Story of ghost ship Sun Sea:

http://www.dailynews.lk/2010/08/28/fea06.asp

Story of ghost ship Sun Sea:

Failed voyage
Whispers about a boat headed to Canada began long ago in Thailand’s small and closely knit Tamil community. First part of this article was published yesterday

Records suggest the Sun Sea was spotted again in Thai waters - again near Songkhla - on May 17. Two days later, 40 Sri Lankans checked in to a hotel there, but were seen that evening boarding fishing boats in Songkhla port.


The Sun Sea plies Thai waters in May, 2010. Pic. courtesy: The Globe and Mail

Five days later, a Thai Navy official stationed in Singapore reported that the still-flagless ship had docked there. Then the ship disappeared again.

“Nobody knows what happened after that. It was like a ghost ship,” said another Thai Navy officer who also spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The ship’s former owners are shocked the journey was attempted at all. Bhumindr Harinsuit, Managing Director of Harin Panich, said the 30-year-old Japanese-built ship was barely able to make the trek between Bangkok and Songkhla.

The idea of taking the rickety boat as far as Canada was too crazy to contemplate.

“Even in the Gulf of Thailand, if there were rough seas she wouldn’t travel. They must have had a good captain,” said Venus Pornprasert, the fleet manager for Harin Panich, who frequently captained the ship. (Some reports have named a veteran Tamil Tiger arms smuggler known as Vinod as the ship’s captain on its journey to Canada.) Making the trip even more astonishing was its cargo of 492 human beings.

When sold, the ship only had sleeping space for 15 crew, one small toilet, a galley kitchen and life rafts for a maximum of 30 people. With space for only 12 tonnes of water, supplies would have had to been harshly rationed to keep from running out mid-journey.

“The captain was taking an amazing risk. We wouldn’t even send it to Malaysia,” Harinsuit said. “The surprise isn’t that someone died (on the way to Canada), the surprise is that it was only one person who died.”

Thai security sources believe the boat-spent part of its journey time bobbing helplessly in international waters in the Gulf of Thailand.

On June 21, three ships were tracked departing from another port in southern Thailand that were believed to be carrying food, water and spare parts for the Sun Sea.

A home away from home

After that, however, they lost track of the ship for good. Later, when the ship was sighted off the coast of Canada, Harinsuit found himself sitting in his office explaining to Thai Police and an RCMP attach‚ everything he could remember about Sun & Rshiya, Kunarobinson and the boat he sold them.

“I told them I never dreamed of this vessel going this far. I even told them it was impossible.”

The Tamils of Bangkok are a mix of traders and asylum-seekers drawn by word that the local office of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees was one of the easiest places to get official refugee status. A UN agency lists 800 officially recognized Tamil refugees living in the Thai capital, many who stay only a few months before they lose track of them.

Few of Thailand’s long-term resident Tamils appear to have been aboard the Sun Sea when it sailed.

Authorities believe most of the migrants flew in on tourist visas just before the Sun Sea left Songkhla.

When asked why they were going to Thailand, they were told to say “Just to enjoy,” explained another patron at the New Madras Cafe, which doubles as a hostel for recent Tamil arrivals and is located just two blocks North of the Sri Maha Mariamman Temple, the centre of spiritual life in Bangkok for the predominantly Hindu Tamils. “But they came because they were going to Canada.”

Though the cafe was almost deserted, the middle-aged man was nervous as he spoke, looking over his shoulder and eventually resorting to writing his answers down on paper so they couldn’t be overheard.

Official Thai documents show that on May 1, authorities sent out a bulletin that 120 Tamils had been spotted travelling from Bangkok to Songkhla in a caravan of two buses and two vans. They were last spotted in the fishing hamlet of Ban Lae, on the outskirts of Songkhla.

“There were four Sri Lankans or Indians who came here in May. They walked around the village and talked among themselves and then two of them came back the next day with two other Sri Lankan people. It was like they were surveying,” said Dollosh Suksuwan, a 30-year-old unemployed oil worker who lives in Ban Lae cargo out to sea. “After dark, after 10 p.m., no one will ask what you are doing.”

Thai authorities believe that the people smugglers used Ban Lae and other fishing villages to ferry their human cargo out to the Sun Sea in small groups. “They could do it anywhere off the coast of Thailand. Thailand has a lot of fishing boats,” a Thai navy source said.

Only one Bangkok Tamil, a man known locally as Anton, is known to be among those who left. After years of living in Thailand with official UNHCR refugee status while his wife and family remained behind in Sri Lanka, Anton told friends in April his family was coming to Thailand to join him. Anton and his family disappeared from Bangkok shortly before the Sun Sea disappeared from Songkhla.

Asked how Anton, an ostensible refugee, could afford to bring his family to Canada at the reported $40,000 to $50,000 per place on the Sun Sea, the nervous cafe patron went silent again. After a pause, he again wrote on a piece of paper: “He was LTTE,” as in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The Tamil Tigers.

The front man

Christhurajah Kunarobinson didn’t live like a man who owned his own business, nor one who was shopping for a 57-metre boat. The 30-year-old lived a Spartan existence in Thailand, paying just $80 month to rent an apartment in a poor neighbourhood of west Bangkok.

Thai documents show Kunarobinson flew into Bangkok from Colombo in April, 2008, on a tourist visa.

Courtesy: The Globe and Mail
To be continued