Jakarta - Indonesian police said yesterday that a commercial vessel hijacked last week by about 170 asylum seekers had been found on an islet off the eastern island of Sumbawa.
A police official from the town of Bima - a district capital of Sumbawa some 1,200 km east of Jakarta - said locals at a village on the islet discovered the asylum seekers whose boat had run aground at an inlet on Saturday evening.
"Locals first found the immigrants on Saturday night. They (the asylum seekers) were trying to find water and food," the Bima deputy police chief commissioner, Mr Ishaka Usman, said. "They wanted to go to Australia but are now on the island under our surveillance. Their boat had engine problems," he added. But Usman said the boat's captain had remained on the vessel and denied it had been hijacked.