Nine Filipinos were handed over to Philippine authorities safe and sound on Saturday after being rescued by a fishing boat, led by Dao Duy Dung from the central Vietnamese province of Binh Dinh.

The six-crew member Vietnamese vessel, coded BD 95 550 TS, detected five men and four women, including a one-year-old baby, were adrift on a small boat with a broken engine while operating in a sea area off the central province of Khanh Hoa, near Vietnam’s Truong Sa (Spratly) archipelago, on Thursday.

After being informed of the circumstance, the Vietnam Maritime Search and Rescue Coordination Center (Vietnam MRCC) contacted the Vietnamese vessel to ask the crew members to offer first aid and food to the Filipinos and guide their boat to an area in Truong Sa.

The Vietnam MRCC then notified and requested its Filipino counterpart to jointly receive the nine victims.

The Filipino agency sent the ship MCS-3005 to the location where the Vietnamese vessel was docking and finally got the victims on board on Saturday afternoon.

The Vietnam MRCC earlier this year handed over Angelito Capindo Rojas, 43, the cook of the Bulk Jupiter ship, to the Philippine Embassy in Hanoi.

He was the only survivor out of the 19 Filipino crew members of the Bulk Jupiter, which sank off southern Vietnam. Rojas was rescued by the Vietnamese vessel SAR 413 after drifting at sea for hours in the wake of the Bahamas-flagged ship suddenly sinking about 150 nautical miles southeast of Vietnam’s Vung Tau City on the morning of January 2.

The ship was in distress while transporting 46,400 metric tons of bauxite from Malaysia to China.

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