Thai police find 26 corpses at people smugglers鈥 camp
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THE remains of 26 migrants thought to be from Myanmar or Bangladesh have been exhumed from a mass grave in Thailand, as details emerged of the maltreatment endured at the remote people smugglers’ camp.
Thai forensic teams yesterday dug out badly decayed skeletons from shallow graves covered by bamboo and a few feet of dirt at the abandoned jungle camp in the Sadao district of Songkhla Province.
“In total we have 26 bodies. As far as I know one is a woman. We still cannot tell the cause of their deaths,” said Police General Jarumporn Suramanee, head of the forensic team.
“There are no more bodies. Every hole has been searched,” he said.
Friday’s grim discovery of the site, which is a few hundred meters from the border with Malaysia, again laid bare Thailand’s central role in a regional human trafficking trade.
Two survivors — men aged 25 and 35 — told doctors they had spent months at the camp despite falling sick and having little to eat.
“Both are malnourished, have scabies and lice,” said Dr Kwanwilai Chotpitchayanku at Padang Besar hospital.
“The older man could not walk, he had to be carried off the mountain. He hadn’t eaten anything for two days before he was found. He told the translator he had a fever in the jungle for two months.”
Doctors said the men had not been fully identified but were from either Bangladesh or Myanmar. Both were rigged to IV drips and appeared frail as they lay in their ward beds.
While the cause of the migrants’ deaths is not yet clear, Thailand’s police chief has described the site as a “virtual prison camp,” which was seemingly abandoned just days before its discovery, with the sick men left for dead.
A rescue worker said one corpse belonged to the recently deceased, seeming to indicate the camp had been occupied recently.
The border zone with Malaysia is criss-crossed by trafficking trails and is notorious for its camps where smuggled migrants are held, usually against their will, until relatives pay ransoms.
Rights groups say the camp, which is a steep, slippery 40-minute hike from the nearest road, is likely to be just one of dozens in the area as the rewards of trafficking continue to outweigh the risks of being caught.
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