Australia Tries to Halt Unrest at Immigration Detention Camp

TEMPO.CO, Sydney-Australian police were trying to restore order on Tuesday at a remote detention center for asylum seekers in the Indian Ocean, after detainees staged a protest and lit a series of small fires throughout the compound.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said federal police reinforcements had arrived at the detention center on the Australian territory of Christmas Island and an operation was under way to wrest back control of the facility from protesting detainees. Staffers were re-entering the facility and police had settled several areas of the compound, Dutton said.

"The government's not going to cower in the face of the activities of some of these criminals," Dutton told reporters in the nation's capital, Canberra.

The unrest broke out on Monday following the death of an asylum seeker who escaped from the facility. The man's body was found on Sunday at the bottom of a cliff on the island. The cause of his death is under investigation.

Immigration officials say a small group of Iranian detainees staged a peaceful protest following the asylum seeker's death, but other detainees then began damaging the property, lighting several small fires and prompting guards to flee the facility.

Refugee Action Coalition spokesman Ian Rintoul, who has been speaking to detainees by phone, said police had been using megaphones to order detainees to return to their rooms.

"Police were dressed in full riot gear with the shields and batons. They could see some of the police were armed," he said.

The people leading the unrest were not believed to be asylum seekers, but detainees who are being held at the facility due to their visas being canceled, immigration officials said.

Australia last year strengthened the power it has to cancel visas, making it mandatory to do so if a person has been sentenced to at least a year in jail. That has led to an influx of New Zealanders with criminal records — some of whom were long-term residents of Australia — ending up in immigration detention while they await deportation. Some of them are appealing the government's decision to revoke their visas.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key said he was told there may be a few New Zealanders involved in the unrest and if so, they're doing nothing to help their case to stay in Australia.

"The risk is that they actually damage their own appeals because they undertake other criminal activity," Key told reporters.

Australia has taken a tough stance in recent years on asylum seekers who try to reach its shores illegally. Asylum seekers who pay people smugglers to take them in rickety boats to Australia from Indonesia are detained on Christmas Island and on the impoverished Pacific island nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

AP