U.S.-COTE D’IVOIRE: Stowaway Deaths Puzzle Officials

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Mar 20 1996 (IPS) - The bizarre death of three young African men who hid in the cargo hold of a ship that docked in New York Tuesday has sparked new questions about the dangers of stowing away.

By all accounts, the deaths of the three men, who apparently sneaked aboard the Singapore carrier ‘Ostfriesland’ when it left Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, two weeks ago, was a rare occurence.

“There have been instances where we have had stowaways before,” said Derek Farthing, a spokesman for the U.S. Customs Service, “but none where they’ve been killed for hiding in the cargo hold.”

The three men were found dead Tuesday as the ship docked in New York’s Red Hook port, their bodies crammed between stacks of burlap bags in a hold used to store cacao beans. U.S. authorities believe that the men were poisoned accidentally when the ship’s crew fumigated the hold with toxic phosphane gas, a standard measure to prevent insect infestation of the cacao.

Ellen Borakove, spokeswoman for the New York Medical Examiner, told IPS after autopsies of the three men, “We believe that phosphane was in fact the cause of their death.” Although the city will continue to conduct chemical examinations, she added, “There is nothing else that we suspect” behind their deaths.

So far, no one has been able to determine when or where the men died, or why they were unable to escape the fumigation of the hold.

“They could have been sleeping,” Farthing speculated. “They could have been so far down (in the hold) that you couldn’t hear them if they cried out for help.”

A fourth stowaway, Seth Lawson of Ghana, was found alive and well in another compartment near the ship’s deck. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) said Lawson will be returned to Cote d’Ivoire on the ‘Ostfriesland’. Lawson did not know the other three stowaways, who have yet to be identified.

Two other stowaways were caught and removed from the ship in Abidjan.

New York has been a key site of illegal immigration over the years, and there are many groups — including criminal gangs operating out of Fukien, China — whom the INS has accused of smuggling immigrants illegally through New York.

According to INS data, New York admitted 14.2 percent of the legal immigants entering the United States in 1993, nearly 130,000 people. Illegal immigration, although unknown, has laso been assumed to be high for the region.

But the New York region has shown fewer incidents of stowaways in recent years. The INS has recorded only six other people as stowaways in the New York port area since October 1994.

The two most recent reported stowaway incidents were in 1990, when the Coast Guard apprehended stowaways aboard the U.S. ‘Mayaguez’, and in 1994, when some 20 Romanians were caught stowing away in Boston Harbour, Farthing said.

But existing data likely underestimates the amount of stowaways, argued Roseann Micallef, executive director of New York’s Centre for Immigrant Rights. “People who stow away and are successful don’t tend to tell anyone about it,” she noted.

The lesson to be learned from the ‘Ostfriesland’ incident, Micallef added, is that it is difficult to assert any responsibility over the safety of stowaways.

Neither the INS nor the Customs Service currently sees the men’s deaths as anything more than an accident, since there is no evidence they were smuggled aboard by any other party and placed into the cargo hold.

“Who would there be to blame?” Micallef asked. “Because they have been assumed to be stowaways, (the deaths) are just seen as the result of their individual acts.”

Even if the owners of the Singapore-flagged ‘Ostfriesland’ were to be deemed somehow responsible, there remains a dispute as to which company owns the ship. Torm West Africa Lines was cited by several officials as the ship’s owner, but t4Y*orm company denied responsibility and referred calls to another company, Bay Ship Management.

Joseph Valiquette, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), said that the existing evidence did not indicate any crime has been committed in the men’s deaths. The FBI is unlikely to investigate.

But the grisly deaths show clearly the dangers of covert travel into the United States. The phosphane gas used to disinfect the cargo is regarded a very lethal nerve agent. Although the gas is supposed to dissipate quickly, it may have permeated the sealed cargo hold for some time.

“Whether these men were alive or dead, transported all the way across, we don’t know,” Farthing said.