Thai police discover 117 more from jungle in trafficking crackdown.
Thai authorities on Saturday questioned more than 100 migrants, discovered on Friday from the country’s south, to determine whether they were victims of human trafficking, according to agencies.‘We need to figure out if any these people are trafficking victims or whether they entered country on their own. If they are victims of human trafficking we must hand them over to Ministry of Social Development and Human Security,’ said Ekarat Sisen, deputy governor of Songkhla Province.Nearly 200 migrants have been detained in a single southern Thai province till Friday evening as Thailand races to meet a deadline to uncover human smuggling camps within its borders.Thai prime minister, Prayuth Chan-ocha announced a 10-day deadline to crack down on the illicit trade. On Friday, Prayuth called for a three-way meeting with neighbours Malaysia and Myanmar to try to resolve a regional human trafficking crisis, following the discoveries.
The 117 migrants were found in Rattaphum district in Songkhla province, near the Malaysian border on Friday. Twenty-six of them are Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar and the rest are from Bangladesh,’ Ekarat Sisen said.Bangladesh ambassador in Thailand Saida Muna Tasneem arrived in Songkhla on Friday night to meet in person the reported Bangladeshi survivors from an alleged mass grave area in the Province’s Sadao area on May 1.Thirty-three bodies, believed to be migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh, have been found in shallow graves over the past week in Songkhla province. Three suspected trafficking camps were also found.Thirteen-year-old Busri Salam, from Bangladesh, said his group disembarked a boat in Thailand and trekked for two weeks through the Thai jungle to try and reach Malaysia. ‘My brother is in Malaysia,’ said Busri. “I wanted to go there.”
Activists and officials say the ongoing crackdown is having an unintended effect: traffickers are taking greater risks to avoid being caught. The results are conditions of increasing desperation.
A Malaysian newspaper on Friday in a news report said that death, hunger and torture were all part of Bangladeshi national Mohd Rashid’s arduous sea journey from Teknaf to Malaysia.Rashid, 26, was seeking work to support his family when a man offered him passage for a pittance.With high hopes, he made the treacherous voyage with over 400 other men in a boat in the hope of finding work on foreign shores – but ended up half-starved and thousands of ringgit poorer.He was lucky. Some of those who made the trip with him died of sickness and starvation, and their bodies were tossed overboard.‘By boat, we all went to the Myanmar border. There, we were loaded into a larger ship and taken to Thailand. From there we crossed the border into Kedah.’From Kedah, he took a bus to Kuala Lumpur, where a friend picked him up. By then, he was incredibly sick and weak.
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