Surya McEwen

You have the red and green lasers on your face.

They're very ready to attack anybody.

They just started shooting up the boat with rubber bullets.

And so it was clearly a different level of aggression from them straight away.

And they took a couple of the comrades.

zip-tied them behind their backs and shackled them and had their had their eyes covered and and then slowly took us one by one and held us on the bow and searched us took everything from us except um and our passports took people's medicine one of my comrades was like bound

um, behind his back and his feet bound and his eyes covered.

And he almost like they, they were pushing him along the boat and they almost pushed him into the water.

Like I was ready to jump in and, and like get him out of the water.

Cause he was totally bound.

Like he wouldn't have been able to swim.

It was wild.

Like they didn't have, um, there's, there's been a, there's been a situation in the past where

If we're very clear not to have, for there not to be any possibility of aggression, often in those moments things are less severe and the violence happens to us once we get to shore.

Okay.

But in this operation it wasn't like that at all.

Like it happened straight away and it was quite severe.

Yeah, you could tell it was a different level of operation.

Like lots of people in interception were shot with rubber bullets and were attacked and tasered.

And it was definitely a different, a different level of violence from the beginning.