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HANOI – Seven bodies believed to be from a boat that sank off Cambodia’s coast were found floating off Vietnam’s southern Phu Quoc island, state media said today.
The vessel with 41 Chinese people on board got into difficulties near the Cambodian casino hub of Sihanoukville last week.
It was carrying migrants from China who had been promised work.
Thirty people were rescued in Cambodian and Vietnamese waters while three of the migrants were found dead, authorities said earlier.
By late yesterday, “seven bodies were recorded drifting to the Bai Truong beach on Phu Quoc island. The bodies were all in the process of decomposition,” the official newspaper of Vietnam’s Public Security Ministry said.
The report said two bodies were found with Chinese identity cards and their decomposing state “is also quite consistent with the time when the boat wreck occurred, a week ago in the Cambodian sea, not far from Phu Quoc”.
Police and officials on the island refused to comment when contacted.
The formerly sleepy fishing village of Sihanoukville in Cambodia has been transformed into a casino hub in recent years following a Chinese investment boom.
There have been multiple recent reports of Chinese and Vietnamese nationals being duped into working in casinos or online scam operations in Sihanoukville and prevented from leaving.
Cambodian authorities have been trying to crack down on human-trafficking networks following widespread reports of people from other Southeast Asian countries being tricked into migrating for job opportunities billed as lucrative. – AFP, September 30, 2022