By Anthony O. Miller
POLICE were last night still combing the Ayia Napa area for almost half the 50 or so boat people dumped ashore on Wednesday night.
Helicopters, vehicle and foot patrols, and coast guard vessels were all involved in the search.
By yesterday morning, police had arrested 29 of the illegal immigrants. They were remanded in custody for eight days following their appearance around noon at the Larnaca District Court.
Of the 29 boat people arrested, 18 were Iraqis (most of them Kurds), six Egyptians, two Somalis, and one each from Burundi, Sri Lanka and the Palestinian Territory. Many of them lacked travel documents, police said.
Police said they were tipped off to the immigrants’ arrival on Wednesday night by a fisherman, who saw them landing in two boats in the Cape Greco area, east of Ayia Napa. Twelve of the boat people were arrested at a hotel on the Paralimni coast.
Those apprehended told police they had paid between $400 and $2,000 apiece to the owners of the two boats – one from Turkey, the other from the Lebanese port of Tripoli – for passage to what they were told would be Rhodes or Italy.
The two boats fled Cyprus after dropping off their human cargo, and were the objects of a helicopter and coast guard search yesterday, Interior Ministry Acting Director Andreas Philippides said.
Philippides said the illegal immigrants’ arrival seemed “proof” that Lebanese authorities had failed to keep any promise they might have made to try to halt the human wave of boat people washing up from Lebanon onto Cyprus shores.
He acknowledged that officials had gone to Beirut last year to discuss the problem of boatloads of illegal immigrants setting out from Lebanon and ending up in Cyprus. “We had some consultations with Lebanon. I don’t know the contents. It seems that we are having the same incidents again.”
He said he did not know if this latest wave of immigrants would trigger further talks about stemming the human tide crashing on Cyprus’ shores.
The Foreign Ministry declined to state what, if any, deal had been hammered out in Lebanon after a boatload of 113 illegal immigrants that set out from Tripoli pitched up in Cyprus in June.
“It’s confidential in nature,” Director General Minas Hadjimichael said.
