Thailand volunteer rescue workers remove the bodies of dead Myanmar migrant workers Thursday, April 10, 2008, from the back of a seafood van in Ranong, Thailand. Fifty-four migrant workers from Myanmar, most of them women, suffocated in the back of an unventilated seafood truck in southern Thailand while being smuggled to the popular resort island of Phuket, police said Thursday. (AP)More than 50 die while locked inside sweltering truck.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Friday, April 11, 2008
RANONG, Thailand — Villagers who discovered a truck abandoned by its driver in sweltering heat found evidence of the brutal cost of human trafficking: 121 illegal immigrants from Myanmar jammed inside, 54 of them dead.
Police were searching Thursday for the driver and clues to who set up the ill-fated journey by the job seekers headed to the booming Thai resort island of Phuket.
Thailand is a magnet for millions of migrants from Cambodia, Laos and especially Myanmar who take menial and dangerous jobs shunned by Thais.
In 2005, Thailand temporarily registered some 1.3 million migrants from the three countries, but a report by the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration said hundreds of thousands more weren't registered, including tens of thousands illegally brought into the country by unscrupulous traffickers.
Survivors in the truck told police that the group traveled Wednesday by fishing boat to Ranong, about 290 miles south of Bangkok.
They were loaded into a truck normally used to carry seafood, locked inside and forced to ride standing up in a sweltering container measuring 7 feet wide by 7 feet high and 20 feet long.
The migrants were on the road for about two hours, survivors said, when passengers started collapsing as outside temperatures in the area reached 93 degrees.
The migrants began pounding and screaming until the driver stopped, unlocked the door and ran away when he saw the state of the victims, survivor Saw Win said.
"I thought everyone was going to die," he said. "If the truck had driven for 30 minutes more, I would have died for sure."
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Friday, April 11, 2008
RANONG, Thailand — Villagers who discovered a truck abandoned by its driver in sweltering heat found evidence of the brutal cost of human trafficking: 121 illegal immigrants from Myanmar jammed inside, 54 of them dead.
Police were searching Thursday for the driver and clues to who set up the ill-fated journey by the job seekers headed to the booming Thai resort island of Phuket.
Thailand is a magnet for millions of migrants from Cambodia, Laos and especially Myanmar who take menial and dangerous jobs shunned by Thais.
In 2005, Thailand temporarily registered some 1.3 million migrants from the three countries, but a report by the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration said hundreds of thousands more weren't registered, including tens of thousands illegally brought into the country by unscrupulous traffickers.
Survivors in the truck told police that the group traveled Wednesday by fishing boat to Ranong, about 290 miles south of Bangkok.
They were loaded into a truck normally used to carry seafood, locked inside and forced to ride standing up in a sweltering container measuring 7 feet wide by 7 feet high and 20 feet long.
The migrants were on the road for about two hours, survivors said, when passengers started collapsing as outside temperatures in the area reached 93 degrees.
The migrants began pounding and screaming until the driver stopped, unlocked the door and ran away when he saw the state of the victims, survivor Saw Win said.
"I thought everyone was going to die," he said. "If the truck had driven for 30 minutes more, I would have died for sure."
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