Tuesday, June 21, 2011
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A Day after 17 foreign nationals were detained from a stranded boat off the Una coast in Junagadh district, police are yet to ascertain their identity. The police said 14 of them claim to be Somali nationals and three from Yemen.
“Local fishermen spotted a boat in wrecked condition on Sunday evening. They informed the police that some unidentified men were swimming towards the shore,” said Junagadh SP Dipankar Trivedi.
By the time local police arrived, 12 of them had reached the shore. The police, with the help of local fishermen, rescued four others. They later found that one more man was on the boat and that he could not swim. He was airlifted by a Coast Guard helicopter. Most of them are aged between 18 and 22, while two of them are in the late 30s.
The police said they were reportedly stranded in the sea for over a month without food and that most of them had gone extremely weak and were ailing.