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Boat crash survivors moved to mainland

All the survivors from the Christmas Island boat crash have been moved to the mainland and released into the community or other forms of immigration detention.

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Source: AAP


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All the survivors from the Christmas Island boat crash have been moved to the mainland and released into the community or other forms of immigration detention.

The Department of Immigration said a group of about 100 people from Christmas Island were moved to the mainland over the weekend.

"They've not actually been granted visas but they've been moved into community-based detention centres and some will be moved to other forms of immigration detention," a department spokesman told AAP on Sunday.

"The group of about 100 does include the survivors from the Christmas Island boat crash."

About 50 people perished when the asylum-seeker vessel SIEV 221 crashed on rocks and broke apart off Christmas Island on December 15.

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Social Justice Network spokesman Jamal Daoud said the department had decided to settle the survivors in Adelaide and Melbourne "without consultation with them or their families". "Almost all of them have family members, relatives or friends in Sydney," Mr Daoud said.

The department dismissed those claims, saying the detainees would not have been moved without consultation or being informed about the move in advance.

"We won't go into the specific details of the locations of where people have been moved, but we have their best interests at heart," the department spokesman said.

Meanwhile, the Refugee Action Coalition has called for the government to act urgently in the cases of three Tamil refugees who it says are on the sixth day of a dry hunger strike - not taking water or food - at Sydney's Villawood detention centre.

A spokesman for the group, Ian Rintoul, says the refugees wrote to the Department of Immigration on February 25, warning of the hunger strike "if they received no answer by March 1 to their request for a permanent solution, either to be resettled in Australia or a third country in a short period of time".

"We are urging the government to act urgently in the cases of the Tamil hunger strikers," Mr Rintoul said.

"They are already at a point where there could be serious long-term damage to their health. They deserve an answer to their questions."


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