Japanese police have confirmed that the body they found off Japan’s Aomori Prefecture on October 11 is of one of the six Vietnamese sailors who jumped overboard from a Taiwanese fishing boat earlier that day.
The confirmation was made through a fingerprint comparison, a source from Japan said Monday.
The six Vietnamese sailors reportedly jumped off the fishing boat when the ship was in the Tsugaru Strait, about 20km from Esanmisaki, Hokkaido Prefecture, at 8:50 pm local time on October 11.
There was one more Vietnamese sailor on board, but he did not jump, said a report from the Tourist, Trade and Labor Export Joint Stock Company (TTLC), a Vietnamese labor exporting company that had sent the seven sailors to Japan.
Japanese Coast Guard (JCG) forces conducted a search for the missing sailors, and a couple of hours later a JCG unit in Aomori, near Hokkaido, found a body that had drifted ashore the Kazamaura village.
However, the name showed on the ID card found on the body did not match any of the six missing Vietnamese sailors, who had boarded the ship at Kaoshiung Port in Taiwan.
The Vietnamese Labor Management Board in Japan then asked the TTLC to provide samples of fingerprints from the six missing people to the JCG in Aomori for comparison.
The JCG later announced that the fingerprints of the body were identical to those of Thieu Sinh Song, 18, one of the missing sailors.
Meanwhile, the other five sailors remain missing, despite an extensive search effort by JCG forces.
After 72 hours of searching with patrol boats and helicopters without finding any trace of the missing sailors, the JCG halted its operations on the evening of October 14, the TTLC said.
The JCG said that during the search, they found three lifebuoys off the port of Ohata, Mitsu City, Aomori Prefecture.
The buoys displayed the name of the fishing boat the six sailors had been on.
The TTLC, citing a report from the ship’s owner, said that six sailors had jumped off the boat in an attempt to quit their job.
Of the six sailors, Nguyen Tien Tinh left Vietnam on January 25, 2014, while the other five left on August 5, TTLC said.
The Vietnamese Embassy in Japan has told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that it is working with local authorities to obtain updated information and handle the case.
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Đăng ký: VietNam News