Just one month after Maryam Hossaini enjoyed a day out with her husband, Hossain, at a museum in Mashhad, the couple decided to pay people smugglers and try for a new life in Australia, as their relatives had done 10 years ago.
The couple—including three-month-old son Sam—were on board the doomed boat, which sailed from Indonesia and crashed into Christmas Island, killing 48 people.
Baby Sam drowned after slipping from his mother’s arms, while husband Hossain is in detention on Christmas Island.
Maryam’s cousin, Maissa Gaderi, came to Australia in 2001 and knew the dangers of a boat voyage. She said she had warned Maryam against such a journey.
But life in Iran was difficult. Maryam often waited months for a paycheck under the health system.
Still, Gaderi was shocked to learn they had attempted the voyage only when she saw Hossain on television. “Hossain is very sad, every day he is crying,’’ she told The Daily Telegraph.
Gaderi has been begging the Australian immigration department for information about her cousin’s fate. “Immigration say, `No, that’s not my job, that’s the federal police job,’ and the [police] say, `No that’s not my job,’’ the 32-year-old said. “No one will help me.’’
The Austraian government says the boat carried about 90 people, mostly Iranians, Iraqis and Kurds. But it has not issued any statistical breakdown by nationality of those killed and those rescued.
One other survivor is understood to be an Iranian boy eight or nine years old who lost both of his parents when the boat was crushed on rocks off Chistmas Island by a storm. The boy has been put into the custody of aunts who came on a later boat that survived.
