Thai authorities resume dig at mass grave of 'boatpeople'

Rescue workers and security forces inspect an abandoned camp in Thailand's southern Songkhla province, May 2, 2015. — Reuters picBANGKOK, May 2 — Thai authorities today resumed the excavation of a mass grave site in a remote patch of jungle where migrants believed to be from Myanmar and Bangladesh were held for months by people smugglers in appalling conditions.

Eight bodies have been recovered so far from the abandoned camp in Sadao district, in Thailand's Songkhla province bordering Malaysia, but efforts to dig up the remainder of the 30 graves were hampered overnight by heavy rain.

The cause of their deaths is not yet clear, but further grim details emerged today of the conditions endured by the migrants, in what Thailand's police chief has described as a "virtual prison camp" where migrants were held in makeshift bamboo cages.

Doctors treating the two sole survivors — men aged 25 and 35-years-old — told AFP their patients were suffering from a range of ailments.

"Both are malnourished, have scabies and lice," doctor Kwanwilai Chotpitchayanku told AFP 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 men were rigged to IV drips and were frail despite their young ages, according to an AFP reporter.

The border zone with Malaysia is criss-crossed by trafficking trails and is notorious for its network of secret camps where smuggled migrants are held, usually against their will, until relatives pay up hefty ransoms.

"The camp is located high up on a hill," Police General Aek Angsananont, national police deputy commissioner, told AFP, adding exhumations of the shallow graves had resumed today.

A rescue workers told AFP four of the dead were "skeletons" while the fifth died just a few days ago, seeming to indicate the camp had been in existence for some time.

Trafficking 'out of control'

Tens of thousands of migrants from Myanmar, mainly from the Rohingya Muslim minority but also increasingly from Bangladesh, make the dangerous sea crossing to southern Thailand, a well-worn trafficking route often on the way south to Malaysia and beyond.

Thousands of Rohingya — described by the UN as one of the world's most persecuted minorities — have fled deadly communal unrest in western Myanmar's Rakhine state since 2012.

Thailand says it is cracking down on the trafficking networks on its soil after revelations that government officers, police and navy officials have been involved in the lucrative trade in humans fleeing poverty and persecution.

In June the United States dumped Thailand to the bottom of its list, or to "Tier 3", of countries accused of failing to tackle modern-day slavery.

Rights groups say traffickers are changing their tactics as the crackdown bites and are also holding thousands of migrants at sea for endless weeks awaiting payment before releasing them.

Thailand's human trafficking problem is "out of control", according to Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch.

"The finding of a mass grave at a trafficking camp sadly comes as little surprise," he said, urging the UN to join the probe to bring those responsible to justice. — AFP

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