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Rescuers find debris thought to be from missing Indonesian submarine
Search teams have recovered debris believed to be from an Indonesian submarine missing for days in the Bali Sea, defence officials said on Saturday, as hopes dwindled for the 53 crew who were expected to have run out of oxygen in the early hours, Reuters reported.
Indonesian Navy Chief of Staff Yudo Margono said the exact location of the 44-year-old submarine was unknown but its presence had been detected and the search would continue.
The KRI Nanggala-402 lost contact on Wednesday as it prepared to conduct a torpedo drill.
“We are still carrying out the search … the depth of the sea we have detected is at 850 metres which is very tricky and presents many difficulties,” he told reporters, adding that he expected the dive in depth taken by the vessel had led to cracks.
“We have found debris floating around the submarine’s last location,” Yudo said.
Rescuers have sent more than a dozen search helicopters and ships to the area where contact was lost, with the United States, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, and India providing assistance.
According to Yudo, the submarine had only enough air to last until around dawn on Saturday if it had lost power, but that this could be stretched for five days if the vessel had retained electricity, Reuters reported.
But even that assessment on oxygen was optimistic, according to experts, because it assumed the submarine had not been crushed by water pressure.
“Now it’ll be up to the investigators to establish the chronology of events and determine the cause. At the same time, plans would have been made to assess the feasibility of retrieving the sub at such extreme depth,” said Collin Koh, Research Fellow at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies.
“It’s technically possible to do it, though I believe Indonesia will have to engage foreign assistance in this.”
Indonesia’s navy has said it is investigating whether the submarine lost power during a dive and could not carry out emergency procedures as it descended to a depth of 600-700 metres, well beyond its survivable limits.
Indonesian navy retired rear admiral Frans Wuwung, who had previously headed the submarine’s machinery room, told news channel MetroTV that he believed a blackout was likely and could have caused the crew to panic.
“A blackout means the vessel’s equipment cannot be moved,” said the admiral, who told reporters he had experienced a blackout on the same submarine in 1985.
One of the people on board was the commander of the Indonesian submarine fleet, Harry Setiawan.
Indonesia operates five submarines — two German-built Type 209s including Nanggala and three newer South Korean vessels.
It has been seeking to modernise its defence capabilities but some of its equipment is old and there have been fatal accidents in recent years.
The Embassy of Japan in Afghanistan announced on Friday that the country has allocated $19.5 million in humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan.
In a statement, the Japanese Embassy said it hopes the aid will help bring positive change to the lives of vulnerable Afghans.
According to the statement, the assistance will cover the basic humanitarian needs of vulnerable communities in Afghanistan.
The embassy added that the aid will be delivered through United Nations agencies, international organizations, and Japanese non-governmental organizations operating in Afghanistan.
Japan’s total assistance to Afghanistan since August 2021 has reached more than $549 million.
Security forces at the Islam Qala border in Herat province prevented hundreds of young Afghans from illegally entering Iran.
Officials from the 207 Al-Farooq Army Corps said that around 530 people attempted over the past two days to illegally enter Iranian territory through areas of Kohsan district in Herat, but border forces detained them and transferred them back to their original areas.
Meanwhile, officials in the local administration of Herat said that due to severe cold along the illegal migration route to Iran, three Afghan migrants have lost their lives in the Kohsan district of the province, and a shepherd has also died there for the same reason.
Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi, spokesperson for the Herat governor’s office, said that some statistics and images shared on social media regarding the incident are not reliable.
According to him, further investigations are underway to determine whether any individuals have died on the other side of the border.
President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program on Thursday that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she is ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program, the Associated Press reported.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.
Neves Valente, 48, is suspected in the shootings at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, and the killing of an MIT professor. He was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said.
Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa beginning in 2000, according to an affidavit from a Providence police detective. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months later obtained legal permanent residence status, according to the affidavit. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.
The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are little represented in the U.S., many of them in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, and the move is almost certain to invite legal challenges.
Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses with the winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the United States. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots.
Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They are interviewed at consulates and subject to the same requirements and vetting as other green-card applicants.
Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery. Noem’s announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals. After an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members in November, Trump’s administration imposed sweeping rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other counties.
While pursuing mass deportation, Trump has sought to limit or eliminate avenues to legal immigration. He has not been deterred if they are enshrined in law, like the diversity visa lottery, or the Constitution, as with a right to citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.
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