DHAKA: Nine bodies have been recovered after a boat carrying 97 people heading for the Indonesian province of Aceh sank off Malaysia’s western coast yesterday, according to the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency.

Twenty-six people remain missing, operations officer Mohd. Hambali Yaakup said by phone text message from Klang, a port city outside Kuala Lumpur. Survivors were rescued by search teams and fishermen, while some swam to a nearby island, he said.

The boat was about 6.1 meters in length and 1.52 meters in width, and had the capacity to carry about 40 people, the Star newspaper reported, citing Selangor state police chief Abdul Samah Mat. It was believed to have been carrying illegal immigrants, the Sun newspaper said.

Malaysia has seen at least nine other incidents of boats carrying illegal immigrants sinking since 2000, according to the New Straits Times. Thousands of undocumented immigrants were arrested in Malaysia last year in a nationwide operation to track down and deport almost half a million illegal workers from countries including Indonesia and Bangladesh.

About 1.3 million overstayers registered for permits during an amnesty in 2011.

Southeast Asia’s third-largest economy is clamping down on cheap illegal labor as it strives to move up the value chain from its agricultural base into more high-end manufacturing and services. Malaysia has a population of about 30 million people and the unemployment rate was at 3 percent at the end of March, according to the Statistics Department.

The incident involving the loss of lives of foreign nationals is the latest in the Southeast Asian nation and comes more than three months after Malaysian Airline System Bhd. (MAS) Flight 370 vanished off radars en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. The hunt for the aircraft has become the longest in modern aviation history and to date, no debris from the Boeing wide-body airliner has been retrieved.

Source: Bloomberg

BDST: 1152 HRS, JUNE 19, 2014