A British adventurer has been detained in the politically sensitive Indonesian province of West Papua after his yacht was wrecked on a reef.
Anthony Corbyn, 65, who has joint British and Australian citizenship, has been held for two weeks in a rat-infested detention centre after after coming ashore with no travel documents after his boat fell foul of the reef as he attempted to sail from Australia to the Philippines.
His boat, Shiseido sank less than a mile away from a small village called Wambi but local police were sceptical when he told them he had lost his papers in the drama.
Mr Corbyn, who said he was interrogated for eight hours by eleven police officers, told The Age newspaper: “It took five minutes for my boat to sink. I had my passports, travel documents and $1,000 (£665) cash in a bumbag. I hung it up while I got into the dinghy but when I turned around, the boat had keeled over.”
Richard Nainggolan, a police spokesman, said officers were sceptical about Mr Corbyn’s story. “We don’t believe him because there were no documents supporting his claims. Why was he sailing through small waters near Wambi village?”
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Mr Corbyn, the author of two books detailing his affairs with married women, described the detention centre in the town of Marauke as “rat, cockroach and mosquito-infested”, and said it was surrounded by a three-metre wall “topped with barbed wire and lights”.
Foreigners cannot be sure of a welcome in West Papua and it is illegal to arrive without the right papers. In 2008 five Australians were held for ten months after flying there from the Torres Strait for a sightseeing trip without the right paperwork.
Keith Mortimer, one of the Merauke Five warned today that Mr Corbyn, who lives in Cairnes, should expect a long wait. Describing the detention centre as “worse than you can imagine”, Mr Mortimer said: “If he’s going to be stuck up there, he has to assimilate with the local population ... if he doesn’t he’ll die.”
In a blurb to his book Lothario’s Diary, Mr Corbyn claims that little can faze him — apart from women.
“I have been face to face with a lion, confronted by a silver-backed gorilla, charged by a bull elephant and stood firm against overwhelming enemy odds while armed with a rifle,” he writes.
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“The only thing that turns my legs to jelly is a woman’s beguiling smile.”
The yachtsman, who was on his third attempt to circumnavigate the world when he saild into trouble said he was confident he would be allowed to leave West Papua as soon as he could buy a ticket out of there.
Indonesian immigration officials said they had contacted the Australian and British embassies in Jakarta. A spokesman for Australia’s department of foreign affairs said: “The man is working with Indonesian authorities to satisfy immigration requirements to enable him to depart.”