A wooden boat carrying asylum seekers was spotted off the Australian coast yesterday in a rare failure of the country's tight surveillance of its northern seas.
The boat was spotted by the crew of an oil tanker within Australia's offshore oil and gas fields 150 kilometers from the northwestern port of Dampier.
The Australian government has been accused of excessive secrecy in how it deals with asylum seeker boats in the two years since the country began turning back vessels and refusing to resettle people who pay smugglers to bring them to Australian shores.