Malaysia police dig to reveal grim secrets of jungle trafficking camps
Print Edition
MALAYSIAN police forensic teams, digging with hoes and shovels, yesterday began pulling out bodies from shallow graves found in abandoned jungle camps where an inter-governmental body said hundreds of victims of human traffickers may be buried.
The Malaysian government said it was investigating whether local forestry officials were involved with the people-smuggling gangs believed responsible for nearly 140 such graves discovered around grim camps along the border with Thailand.
The dense forests of southern Thailand and northern Malaysia have been a major stop-off point for smugglers bringing people to Southeast Asia by boat from Myanmar, most of them Rohingya Muslims who say they are fleeing persecution, and Bangladesh.
Authorities took a group of journalists to one of the camps, nestled in a gully in thick jungle up a steep, well-worn path about an hour’s walk from the nearest road, where a witness saw the first body removed yesterday afternoon.
Malaysian police said on Monday they had found 139 graves, some containing more than one body, around 28 camps scattered along a 50-kilometer stretch of the border in the northern state of Perlis.
Joel Millman, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, told a news briefing in Geneva that the body’s representative in the region “predicts hundreds more (bodies) will be found in the days to come.”
The grisly discoveries in Malaysia followed the uncovering of similar graves on the Thai side of the border at the beginning of May, which helped trigger a regional crisis. The find led to a crackdown on the camps by Thai authorities, after which traffickers abandoned thousands of migrants in overloaded boats in the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea.
Thousands of Rohingya Muslims are ferried by traffickers through southern Thailand each year, and in recent years it has been common for them to be held in remote camps along the border with Malaysia until a ransom is paid for their freedom.
State news agency Bernama quoted Malaysia’s police chief, Inspector General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar, as saying that the camps were thought to have been occupied since 2013, and two were “only abandoned between 2-3 weeks ago.”
The scale of the discoveries has raised questions about the level of complicity by officials on both sides of the border.
Malaysia’s Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said yesterday that initial investigations revealed links between forest rangers and smuggling syndicates, Bernama reported, adding that some had been detained as part of the probe.
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