Men caught trying buy boat to get to Aust
Lauren Farrow and Heru Rahadi - AAP on June 28, 2016, 7:10 pm
Four Bangladeshi asylum seekers have been detained in Indonesia after they were allegedly caught buying a boat to take them to Australia.
The men along with two Indonesian middlemen were "ambushed" on Monday night in Sukabumi, West Java, while they were in a villa.
The district's military commander Guruh Prabowo Wirajati said the men, who say they are from Bangladesh, were about to buy a boat for 40 million Rupiah ($A4000) with the intention of travelling to Christmas Island.
"We received information that someone was looking for a boat saying he wanted to bring illegal immigrants to Australia. From there we followed it up," Mr Wirajati told AAP.
It is suspected around 10 other people were due to meet the group at the villa but their plans were interrupted by officials, he added.
The men, who have been handed over to immigration, allegedly did not have passports or other identification papers.
They were detained for travelling to Indonesia without identification, he said.
It comes just weeks after more than 40 Sri Lankan asylum seekers became stranded in waters off Aceh on June 11 in a failed attempt to get to Australia by boat.
After days of threatening to tow the boat back into international waters and firing warning shots in the air when they tried to disembark, the Indonesian government eventually allowed the group to come to shore and be assessed by the International Organisation for Migration and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Earlier this month Immigration Minister Peter Dutton claimed there were more than 14,000 people "ready to get on boats" in Indonesia depending on the outcome of the federal election.
But Australia's immigration policy has come under criticism from the UNHCR, which says it has not "stopped the boats" as claimed but only created a "bottleneck" in the region and placed more pressure on countries like Indonesia.
According to the latest figures from the UNHCR there are approximately 13,745 people in Indonesia in limbo - with more than 6500 of these already deemed refugees and more than 7100 classified as asylum seekers.
Indonesia is not a signatory to the UN convention on refugees so they must be resettled elsewhere.
