Air Force plane hours from rescue scene- missing people

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MISSING BOAT

Where are the missing people who were on board?

The Australian Government has marshalled three planes to search for passengers missing after their boat sank in the ocean hundreds of miles from the Cocos Islands.

Nineteen people have been plucked from the sea and about 20 are still missing, but it is still not clear whether the boat was carrying asylum seekers trying to reach Australian waters.

Seventeen of the rescued were picked up by a natural gas carrier and the Federal Government has confirmed they are all men aged between 20 and 40.

Another two people were collected by a Taiwanese fishing boat.

The Government says it does not know the origins of the boat that sank or its occupants, and it has not ruled out taking the survivors to Christmas Island.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority is coordinating the rescue operation in Australia's vast search and rescue zone.

The capsized boat is 2,700 kilometres from the mainland and more than a day's sailing from the nearest Australian government vessel, HMAS Larrakia.

And the Federal Government says a Royal Australian Air Force plane, a P3 Orion, is still hours away from the scene.

A Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) jet is flying from Perth and a Customs Dash 8 aircraft will also join the search.

"It's just such a long way away it's a matter of trying to get aircraft to the region as quickly as possible," said Stephen Langford from the RFDS.

He says time is critical.

"It's a fairly urgent task because there's still people in the water and the weather is not fantastic," he said.

Government rescue efforts

Home Affairs Minister Brendan O'Connor says the Government has decided to work with the boats already in the region to carry out the rescue operation.

But he will not say where the rescued people will be taken.

"We'll ensure that we do everything we can, firstly to rescue any remaining passengers that are at sea and provide whatever other support is required to assist the commercial vessels," he said.

"That's our focus at the moment, but of course we'll look to the other issues about where the passengers should head as soon as we've done everything we can to save people that may be in the sea at this point."

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says it is too soon to consider where the people should be taken.

"Our priority right now has to be, as you would expect of any government, to deploy necessary resources to attend to lives at risk on the high seas," he said.

Night-time accident

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority received a distress signal from the stricken boat about 11:15pm last night.

A spokesman for the Home Affairs Minister's office says a small Taiwanese fishing boat nearby told the Safety Authority that the boat of asylum seekers was taking on water but was not sinking.

The Taiwanese fishing trawler was not big enough to take the people on board and it stayed alongside until a Bahamas-flagged merchant ship, the LNG Pioneer, arrived.

The ABC understands the merchant ship arrived at the very moment the boat started sinking.

The Chief of the Defence Force, Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston, has shed some light on what happened next.

"When the first ship got there, this vessel was still intact," he said.

"Somehow or other during the process of the interaction between the ship and the trawler and also the stricken vessel, there has been a capsize and people have ended up in the water."

All 40 people on board the sinking boat ended up in the ocean.

The Government said there was no moonlight and that made search and rescue very difficult.

Australian Broadcasting Corporations 2009

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