News Desk :A total of 139 graves and 28 human-trafficking camps have been found in a remote northern Malaysian border region, said Malaysian Inspector-General of Police (IGP) Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar, according to agency reports. “We have found 139 graves, which are suspected to contain bodies of migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh and some 28 abandoned camps,” he revealed the findings at a press conference on Monday.The briefing was held a day after the government announced the discovery of camps and graves, the first such sites found in Malaysia since a regional human-trafficking crisis erupted earlier this month.The Malaysian police chief said that the abandoned human-trafficking camps were unearthed along a 50-kilometre stretch of the Malaysian-Thai border.He added that the number and size of the 28 camps found suggested that they may have housed a combined hundreds of people. The largest could hold up to 300 people, another had a capacity of 100, while the rest could hold about 20 each, he said. The graves have been unearthed since May 11 till May 23, and some may contain more than one body, he said. “We found a highly decomposed body on the ground, believed to have died two weeks ago. But we do not know how many bodies are in the graves but exhumation works began on Monday,” Khalid Abu Bakar said. He said, “We can’t tell yet if they are the Rohingyas or Bangladeshis. The number and size of the 28 camps found suggested that they may have housed a combined hundreds of people.”He added they also found signs of torture in 28 trafficking camps suspected to have been used by gangs smuggling migrants across the border with Thailand.The dense jungles of southern Thailand and northern Malaysia have been a major route for smugglers bringing people to Southeast Asia by boat from Myanmar, most of them Rohingya Muslims who say they are fleeing persecution, and Bangladesh.The police chief said the authorities were in the painstaking process of exhuming and conducting post-mortems on the remains.”The camps and graves were in jungle, mountainous areas that were difficult to reach,” Khalid Abu Bakar said. He, however, declined to respond to a question on how such an extensive system of camps could have existed without detection by authorities and whether the complicity of corrupt officials was suspected.”The camps where the graves have been unearthed are close to Padang Besar in Thailand’s southern Songkhla province where Thai police had earlier found trafficking camps and dozens of shallow graves,” Khalid Abu Bakar.The discovery is the latest evidence of the lethal nature of the region’s human-trafficking trade, the Malaysian IGP said.Police in neighbouring Thailand in early May had found secret human-trafficking camps on their side of the border and dozens of shallow graves.Rights groups have long accused Malaysian authorities of not doing enough to contain human-smuggling.Malaysian officials had subsequently dismissed the suggestion that similar sites existed on Malaysian soil.Thailand launched a crackdown on human-smuggling following the discovery of its mass graves.The move appears to have caused nervous traffickers to abandon their human cargo at sea, leaving boats filled with hundreds of starving migrants seeking to land in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.After initially turning them away, Malaysia and Indonesia last week bowed to international pressure, saying they would admit boat people pending their repatriation or resettlement elsewhere.The discovery by the police has proved claims that there were such trafficking camps on the Malaysian side of the border, believed to be set up by human trafficking syndicates.
