SYDNEY: Australian Immigration Minister Tony Burke Wednesday described as “horrific” explosive claims that asylum seekers at one of its processing camps in Papua New Guinea are being raped and tortured.

A former senior official at the Manus Island facility also detailed “almost daily” self-harm and attempted suicides while warning weapons were being accumulated in readiness for a break-out attempt.

“I’ve never seen human beings so destitute, so helpless and so hopeless before,” Rod St. George, the former head of occupational health and safety at the center, told SBS television. The allegations come just days after Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced that the facility would be massively expanded to accommodate 3,000 people, from the original 600, as part of a new hard-line plan to send all asylum-seeker arrivals to Papua New Guinea.

“I took the position with every intention of making the place a safer environment but it proved quite rapidly to be an impossibility,” St. George said. Disgusted by what he saw at the facility, which has been off-limits to the Australian media, St. George quit.

Under the new hard-line policy, unauthorized boatpeople arriving in Australian waters will now be banished to Manus Island and elsewhere in the Pacific nation for assessment, and even if found to be “genuine refugees” they will have no chance of being settled in Australia.

Instead, they will have to remain in poverty-stricken and lawless PNG, be sent back home or to third countries.

Burke said he would fly to Manus Island this week to investigate, and any troublemakers would be removed from the camp.

“I’ll be in Manus in the next couple of days and I’ll have a look for myself,” he told ABC radio, adding that he was made aware of the allegations a week-and-a-half ago but only spoke to St. George on Tuesday evening. “The allegations were horrific. I wish I’d had an opportunity to get the specifics of them earlier than last night because I would’ve started acting on them earlier than last night,” Burke said.

“There’s no doubt that what has been described involves some situations and crimes which must not be allowed to occur.” Burke is also due to visit Australia’s other main processing camp on Nauru in the Pacific, which was rocked by riots that razed buildings on Saturday following Rudd’s announcement of his new boatpeople policy.

Australia has struggled to stem an influx of asylum-seekers arriving by boat, with record numbers turning up in 2012 and more than 15,600 so far in 2013.

Hundreds have drowned making the journey, with another boat sinking off Indonesia late Tuesday with casualties feared, although rescuers said at least 157 had been saved.