A father-of-three who was pulled from the water after going overboard a cruise ship last week has been identified, with his brother claiming he had racked up a $4000 casino debt on board.
P&O’s Pacific Adventure was due to dock in Sydney Harbour at 6am on Monday, May 6 at the end of a three-day Elvis-themed cruise, but Shane Dixon, 50, went overboard in the early hours.
The ship remained in the waters just off the city’s eastern suburbs while a huge search was underway and a man’s body was retrieved from the water at 10.30am, 10 nautical miles off Sydney Heads.
Habibullah, who goes by one name, is the sole survivor of an asylum-seeker boat that sank in October on its way to Christmas Island with 34 men on board.
“There was rain and strong winds, and on the second night there was a storm, and we were swinging like a pendulum,” Habibullah told AFP in Jakarta, where he has been detained since his rescue.
“In the morning, we saw bodies floating in the water surrounding the boat.”
The small, 20-metre vessel lost power a few hours into the voyage on October 26 from Java. It sank a day later.
Habibullah choked with emotion as he described how his fellow asylum seekers were swept one-by-one to their death after losing their grip on a rope that held them together in the water.
“I was waiting for my turn to die,” he said of his harrowing four days at sea with no food and nothing to drink.
He had paid almost $US10,000 ($A9,500) to smugglers in the hope of ending up in Australia, which he calls “the land of freedom”.
Having fled the unrest of Afghanistan, he had moved to the Pakistani city of Karachi, but lived in constant fear of attacks against him and his Shiite Muslim community.
When the boat lost power, one of the Indonesian sailors abandoned ship, leaving one sailor and a mechanic behind, he said.
The vessel sank the next day, but the men remained optimistic they would be rescued or carried ashore by the ocean, Habibullah said.
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