Chinese boat people forced to swim to remote island through frigid sea

More Chinese boat people were discovered wandering on an isolated island on Canada's Pacific coast on Thursday, a day after being…

More Chinese boat people were discovered wandering on an isolated island on Canada's Pacific coast on Thursday, a day after being forced to swim ashore in frigid water from the ship on which they had been smuggled, officials said.

The four men, according to a local news account, had been told by the smugglers there was a highway on the nearly unpopulated island that they could walk to.

They were with a group of about 130 immigrants, including young children, dropped off on Wednesday at the southern tip of the Queen Charlotte Islands.

The four were picked up by emergency crews and airlifted to a hospital, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

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Most of the recent group was rescued on Wednesday. They were transported to the Victoria area the next day, and are being processed as possible refugees. The boat on which they arrived was discovered on Monday in international waters. It was seized on Wednesday after it dumped its human cargo.

No deaths have been reported in the incident, but authorities who arrived almost immediately were so worried about the situation they had emergency supplies air-dropped before removing the immigrants from the area by boat. Mounties discovered the four stragglers in a follow-up search of the drop-off area on the Queen Charlotte chain's Kunghit Island, which is about 800 km north-west of Vancouver. The rugged island is only accessible by boat or aircraft.

"We did not have an exact count of the people off-loaded and we wanted to confirm that there wasn't anyone who was scared or confused and had hidden or run off or anything," Constable Tracey Rook said.

Officials said they did not know yet if the people will claim refugee status, as the 123 on board a similar boat did after arriving in July at an isolated bay on Vancouver Island.

The smugglers' boat, a 50-metre former driftnet fishing vessel believed to be from South Korea, was seized by Canada several hours after it dropped off the immigrants, officials said. Eight crew members on board the boat have been arrested.

About 132 people, believed to be Chinese, were brought to the US shore on Thursday from a freighter that immigration officials say smuggled them to the south-east US coast. The ship's Mandarin-speaking passengers - all of them men - were taken off the ship after the US Coast Guard intercepted the ship off the coast of Savannah, Georgia on Wednesday evening and brought it to shore.