JAKARTA (Reuters) - Some 350 migrants from several Muslim countries drowned in the Java Sea off Indonesia at the weekend after a boat carrying them to an unknown destination sank, a relief body said on Monday.
A total of 44 people survived the disaster, including an eight-year-old boy who lost 21 members of his family, a spokesman for the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration (IOM) said.
The spokesman said the passengers on the boat, which had sailed from the island of Java on Thursday, were overwhelmingly Iraqi but included Iranians, Afghans, Palestinians and Algerians.
The destination of the boat was not known, but thousands of illegal migrants travel in rickety vessels in the seas around Southeast Asian countries in search of refuge in richer countries.
Geneva diplomats who track illegal migration said the vessel was almost certainly on the way to Australia.
According to survivors' accounts cited by the IOM, 421 people were on board when the vessel set sail but 21 asked to be put back to shore early last Friday and were left on a small Indonesian island.
In August, a Norwegian freighter rescued more than 400 mainly Afghan migrants after their vessel ran into problems off Java. Australia refused to take the refugees after they had forced the freighter toward Australian waters, triggering a storm of international criticism.