YouTuber is arrested after leaving Diet Coke on isolated tribe’s island

An American tourist set off alone last week on an inflatable boat for the remote island of North Sentinel in the Indian Ocean. He had packed a Diet Coke and a coconut as an offering for the highly isolated tribe that lives there, and he had brought along a GoPro camera in hopes of filming the encounter, the Indian police said.

Guided by his GPS navigation, the man, Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov, 24, reached the northeastern shore of the island at 10 a.m. on March 29, according to police. He scanned the land with binoculars, but saw no one. So he climbed ashore, left the Diet Coke and the coconut there, took sand samples, and recorded a video, police said.

Polyakov was arrested March 31 when he returned to Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, an archipelago more than 800 miles east of India’s mainland, authorities said.

Few outsiders have been to the island of North Sentinel, which is a territory of India and is illegal to visit. Indian government regulations prohibit any outsider interaction with its isolated tribe, whose members hunt with bow and arrow and have killed intruders for stepping onto their shore.

But Polyakov was not deterred. He had planned his journey “meticulously,” police said, studying sea conditions, tides, and accessibility from Khurmadera Beach, located on Andaman island.

Even after he pushed back from North Sentinel island, Polyakov tried to attract the attention of the Sentinelese people by blowing a whistle from his boat, police said.

He was accused of attempting to “interact with the Sentinelese tribe,” police in Andaman said in a statement. Polyakov is being held on charges that include violating a law protecting aboriginal tribes and is scheduled to appear in court April 17. The charges carry a possible sentence of up to five years in prison and a fine.

Survival International, a group that protects the rights of Indigenous tribal peoples around the world, said that Polyakov’s attempted contact with the tribal people of North Sentinel was “reckless and idiotic.”

“This person’s actions not only endangered his own life, they put the lives of the entire Sentinelese tribe at risk,” the group’s director, Caroline Pearce, said in a statement. “It’s very well known by now that uncontacted peoples have no immunity to common outside diseases like flu or measles, which could completely wipe them out.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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