INS Arrests Another Group From China on Cargo Ship

By TERRY McDERMOTT

Jan. 4, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

For the third time in less than a week, Chinese nationals have been discovered stowed away on a ship at the Long Beach-Los Angeles harbor complex.

U.S. Immigration and Naturalization officials say the stowaways appear to be a part of a sophisticated smuggling operation.

Eighteen suspected illegal immigrants were arrested Sunday at the port of Long Beach.

They had been inside a cargo container on board the Zim Shekoo, a ship that left Hong Kong 20 days ago with intervening stops in South Korea and Canada, INS officials said.

The 18 people arrested were all male, six of them juveniles, and all from Fujian province in the People’s Republic of China. They are in the custody of the INS.

Last week, a total of 30 other immigrants were found in cargo containers in two incidents at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

In a fourth incident, 12 Chinese men were found in a container on a ship docked in Seattle on Sunday. In that case, authorities also arrested three men allegedly waiting to pick up the stowaways.

The containers in all four cases were apparently loaded in Hong Kong, said Rosemary Melville, deputy director of the Los Angeles district INS office. She said the 18 people found in the container on the Zim Shekoo were discovered at sea by representatives of Zim Container Services, the shipping line. Some of the people had crawled out of the container and were discovered wandering around the ship’s hold.

The container was supposed to have carried heavy machinery, an indication that people who loaded the container onto the ship in Hong Kong should have known something was amiss, Melville said.

She said there was no evidence of cooperation in the smuggling operation by the ship’s crew.

The fate of those arrested will be determined on a case-by-case basis. The ones found in the Long Beach-Los Angeles harbor are being held at Terminal Island.

INS officials said in previous cases people have paid as much as $50,000 to be smuggled aboard ships bound for the U.S.