‘Castaways’ Sailed From France, Lived in Germany : Sri Lankans Traveled on Chinese Ship

Some of the 152 Sri Lankan refugees plucked from the Atlantic off Canada lived in West Germany and sailed from France aboard a Chinese freighter, a German who claimed he helped plan the exodus said today.

Waldemar Steen, 61, a German and a self-described adviser to asylum seekers, said in Jork, West Germany, that 25 of the Sri Lankans came from Stade, northwest of Hamburg, and that others came from Jork, Hamburg and the Ruhr city of Essen.

Steen said in a television interview that the Sri Lankans gathered in Jork across the Elbe River from Hamburg on July 27 to take buses for France and there they boarded a Chinese freighter at Calais.

“Jork was the collection point,” Steen said. “They came here to get transportation to France. They came in twos and threes.”

Asked by the television interviewer why the Tamils left West Germany, where about 37,000 Tamil refugees already reside, Steen answered, “Who says Germany is safe?”

A spokesman for the town of Jork confirmed that six Sri Lankans who had applied for asylum in West Germany have not been seen recently. He said the flats they had lived in are now vacant.

Bonn Would Block Them

Although 37,000 Sri Lankans have gone to West Germany, the Bonn government is considering ways of halting a flood of refugees from the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

Most of the Sri Lankans who have ended up in West Germany have flown to East Berlin and then crossed the border into West Berlin or gone straight to West Germany from East Berlin.

The castoffs, who were among the 152 found drifting in two crammed lifeboats off Newfoundland, told rescuers Tuesday that they had been adrift in Canadian waters for five days and had paid up to $5,000 each for passage from India to Canada to flee civil strife in their Asian island homeland.

But a longtime member of Newfoundland’s Sri Lankan community, who interviewed many of the boat people, disputed their itinerary and said many carried German newspapers, West German telephone numbers and German currency.

“I don’t think they are telling the truth at all,” Rod Singarayer told the Toronto Star. “I think they started out in Germany, not India.”

Singarayer said the 143 men, four women and five children claimed they fled Sri Lanka because of the civil war there between the radical Tamils and the majority Sinhalese so they could qualify as refugees and remain in Canada.

One-Year Permits Likely

“They are survivalists,” he said. “They wanted to be in Canada permanently.”

Canada’s Immigration Minister Benoit Bouchard said Tuesday that the new refugees will be given special one-year permits if it is confirmed that they are from Sri Lanka, an island nation off the southeast coast of India.

Government spokesmen at ministries in West Germany and France both denied that the mystery vessel that brought the refugees across the Atlantic had originated at ports in their countries.

Canadian transportation officials concede that they may never find the vessel.

A Canadian newspaper said one of the Canadian fishermen who spotted the lifeboats read the name Regina Maris on one. There was no trace of a Regina Maris in Lloyd’s Register of Shipping’s 1985-86 edition.

One rescuer said also that Hamburg and Hapag Lloyd, the names of large West Germany shipping companies, were on castaways’ life jackets.