As the investigation into human trafficking from the Kerala coast progresses, police have arrested a person who is said to be the co-owner of the boat that was used for trafficking.
Anilkumar, the co-owner of the boat Dayamatha, was taken into custody by the investigating team. The boat is believed to have been used by the trafficking gang for taking a group of people to Australia.
The other owner of the boat, Srikanth from Tamil Nadu's Thakkala, is believed to have bought the boat from its previous owner, Jibin Antony, for Rs 40 lakh on January 7. They had fled their home at Kovalam on the same day.
The probe began after local residents informed the police about some abandoned bags that they had found in Cherai and Munambam areas. This led to the probe into the suspected trafficking of around 40 non-Keralites in the vessel to Australia from Ernakulam.
Agencies, including a special squad of Kerala Police and Intelligence Bureau, have begun investigation.
The probe is to find out whether the people who took rooms in resorts and home-stays on January 5, providing Delhi addresses, had left the coast in the boat on January 12 or 13. If they had done so, it would be a clear case of human trafficking to Australia because similar attempts were made a couple of years back from Munambam but in vain, they had said.
The investigating team are questioning eight people who spoke to Srikanth on January 12 and 13 on the phone. Police are also investigating homes where the some of the women and children stayed before they left.
Kerala police also searched the houses rented by the group in New Delhi's Ambedkar Colony and took the house owners' statements.
Police were able to gather evidence to the fact that some months ago, a group of refugees had stayed at Alappuzha in a lodge before leaving the country in a similar manner.
The Indian Navy and Coast Guard were directed to deploy their vessels to search for the boat, a Defence spokesman said in Kochi on Tuesday.
Coast Guard aircraft are also involved in the search, but identifying the particular boat would not be an easy task as the information about the incident reached the agencies very late—24 hours after their suspected departure from the coast—the spokesman said.
"As the days pass, the area of search will increase. It is a gradual, but deliberate area of search," he said. Defence sources said it was not clear how effective searches could be carried out amid thousands of boats, which are already in the sea for fishing.
The sources also said that the Navy and the Coast Guard cannot treat the issue as a matter of coastal security. "It is not a coastal security issue. This is a legal issue. Illegal trafficking. It is a state issue, policing issue," a source said.
Local television channels Tuesday telecast CCTV footage of the trafficked persons during their stay at a lodge in Cherai in Ernakulam. The trafficked people, including women and newborns, had left their resorts and home stays in Cherai and Munambam coastal areas of the district on January 12, police had said.
Police had said that the addresses and proof of identity recovered from the resorts and home-stays revealed that the 40 people were of Tamil origin.
In 2015, Australia had made it clear that people who attempt to travel illegally to the country by sea would not be allowed to settle there.
The country's Consul-General to South India had further stressed that anyone who survived the journey would be intercepted and transferred to Regional Processing Centres in Nauru or Manus Island (in Papua New Guinea).
