An American tourist has been arrested after supposedly traveling to a remote island in Bengal’s bay and trying to contact one of the most isolated tribes in the world.
Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov, 24, made the illegal trip to North Sentinel Island, home of the enigmatic tribe Sentinese, on March 29, the Indian police told CNN.
North Sentinel Island is approximately the size of Manhattan in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, about 1200 km from the Indian continent.
Indian law prohibits visiting the island to maintain the way of life sentry and protect them from modern diseases, of which they lack immunity.
While Polyakov successfully arrived at the island, it does not seem to have contacted the sentinel tribe, he told CNN Jitendra Kumar Meena, head of the Criminal Investigation Department of Andaman and Nicobar.
He was seen by a local fisherman on his way back and arrested two days later, Meena said. Police confiscated an inflatable pope and engine of Polyakov.
He has not yet been accused of any crime.
A spokesman for the United States Department of the United States said that “we are aware of the reports of the arrest of an American citizen in India” in a statement to CNN, but we could not comment more about the case.
It is not clear if Polyakov has retained a lawyer.
The Sentineles have only contacted the modern world a handful of times and it is known that they vigorously reject strangers.
Because the centinelos are so lonely, it is difficult to know how many there are: estimates vary from dozens to hundreds.
Previous meetings with the tribe have proven to be fatal. In 2018, American missionary John Allen Chau was killed by courts after arriving at North Sentinel Island, hoping to turn Christianity to local people.
Polyakov is “lucky not having made contact otherwise, he would have known the same destiny,” Meena said.
Caroline Pearce, director of Survival International, a non -profit organization dedicated to the protection of isolated tribal groups, described the alleged Polyakov actions “imprudent and idiot”.
“The actions of this person not only endanger their own life, but also put the lives of the entire sentinel tribe at risk,” Pearce said in a statement.
“It is well known at this point that unpaort peoples do not have immunity to common external diseases such as flu or measles, which could eliminate them completely,” he added.
Polyakov planned his trip in advance, visiting the Andaman islands twice before traveling to North Sentinel on his third visit, supposedly leaving a beach about 40 km in the south of Andaman, Meena said.
“According to what he has revealed in the investigation, he said he is interested in adventures.
He said he had left some soda bottles there for the tribe, but we have not found anything so far, “Meena said.
Police have seized Polyakov’s phone and GoPro, as well as a bottle of sand that supposedly picked up from the island.
A special research team is carrying out a search on the island from afar, in boats using binoculars, despite the choppy waters in recent days, Meena said.
The ‘most isolated’ tribe in the world
There are more than 100 tribes not contacted worldwide, mainly in the Amazon jungle, but the centinelos are “the most isolated indigenous peoples in the world,” according to Survival International.
Most of what is known about them comes from tied ships more than the distance of an arrow from the shore and the rare past meetings with the authorities.
Sentinel hunting in the tropical jungle and fish in coastal waters using spears, arches and arrows, as well as narrow -free stabilizer canoes, according to Survival International.
It is believed that they live in three groups in large communal cabins and more informal shelters on the beach.
The first contact with the sentinel tribe was made by the British at the end of 1800, when, despite their attempts to hide, six people from the tribe were captured and taken to the main island of the archipelago of the island of Andaman.
An Indian law of 1956 prohibits strangers from traveling to North Sentinel and other islands in the home archipelago of indigenous groups.
With the exception of a brief and friendly interaction in the early 1990s, the Sentineles have fiercely resisted contact with strangers, even after disaster.
In 2004, after the Asian tsunami who devastated the Andaman chain, a tribe member was photographed on a beach on the island, shooting arrows to a helicopter sent to verify his well -being.
Two years later, the members of the tribe killed two poachers who had been fishing illegally in the waters surrounding the island of North Sentinel after their boat diverted on land, according to Survival International.
Pearce, from Survival International, said that India, who has accumulated military infrastructure in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in recent years in case of confrontation with China, has a “legal responsibility” to protect the centineous peoples of the missionaries, the influencers of social networks, illegal fishermen or any other person.
There have been other meetings with tribes not contacted in recent years.
In February, a young man from an isolated indigenous tribe in Brazil made a brief contact with the outside world before returning to the Amazon jungle.
In 2024, Survival International published rare images of the Mashco Piro tribe not contacted on the remote Peruvian Amazon, informing that the tribe was trying to evade the registrars.
