A boat capsizes off the coast of Malaysia, killing ten people and leaving many missing

Officials said the ship capsized near a beach town in the South China Sea, leaving 29 people missing.

According to Malaysian officials, a boat carrying at least 60 Indonesian migrants sank in the South China Sea before daybreak on Wednesday, killing at least ten people and leaving 29 others missing.

A spokesman for Malaysia's Maritime Enforcement Agency said the boat capsized in bad weather around 4:30 a.m. off the shore of Tanjung Balau, a beach town in the southeastern Malaysian state of Johor.

According to the spokeswoman, Nurul Hizam Zakaria, twenty-one persons were rescued after the agency deployed a helicopter and two boats for a search-and-rescue operation just before 9 a.m.

Malaysia's national news agency, Bernama, shared a photo on Twitter of people on a beach retrieving a capsized boat from the waves.

All of the passengers onboard, according to a spokeswoman for the Malaysian Army's Third Infantry Division, were Indonesians.
They had sailed from Batam, an Indonesian island on the Singapore Strait, he added.

Batam is close enough to Singapore and neighbouring Malaysia that it was connected to the city-state by frequent boat service prior to the outbreak.

In the region, boat accidents are regular, and some have involved Rohingya refugees.

Thousands of Rohingya Muslims have tried the risky boat trip to Malaysia from Myanmar, where they face ethnic persecution, or Bangladesh, where they often live in poverty, throughout the years.
They usually make their way to Malaysia's west coast via the Straits of Malacca.

Officials in Malaysia have occasionally barred such refugee boats from docking.
Last year, the Bangladeshi Coast Guard recovered one of them, and authorities discovered hundreds of hungry and dehydrated people imprisoned in the boat's hold by human traffickers.