KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia detained more than a thousand Bangladeshi and Rohingya refugees, including dozens of children, police said, a day after authorities rescued hundreds stranded off the coast of Indonesia’s western tip.
There has been a huge increase in refugees from impoverished Bangladesh and Myanmar drifting on boats to Malaysia and Indonesia in recent days after Thailand, usually the initial destination in the region’s people smuggling network, announced a crackdown on the trafficking.
Over 100 refugees from these countries were found wandering around in southern Thailand last week, apparently after they were abandoned by the smugglers.
An estimated 25,000 Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar and Bangladeshis boarded people smugglers’ boats in the first three months of this year, twice as many in the same period of 2014, the UN refugee agency UNHCR has said. Most travel in rickety traffickers’ boats to Thailand, where they are held in squalid jungle camps until a ransom is paid.
Police on the northwest Malaysian island of Langkawi, close to the border with Thailand, said three boats arrived in the middle of the night to unload the refugees, who were taken into custody as they came ashore. One boat was discovered after it got stuck on a breakwater, but the other two vessels escaped. There was no immediate word on the crew.
“They came from their respective countries, moved towards Thailand and into Malaysia by Langkawi,” local police chief Harrith Kam Abdullah told Reuters. He did not elaborate.
The boats contained 555 Bangladeshis and 463 Rohingya, who would be handed over to the immigration department, he added.
Malaysia, one of Southeast Asia’s wealthier economies, has long been a magnet for illegal immigrants from poorer countries in the region. Nearly 600 migrants thought to be Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshis were rescued from at least two wooden boats stranded off the coast of Indonesia’s Aceh province on Sunday, authorities said.
The overcrowded boats, which were carrying nearly 100 women and dozens of children among the refugees, were towed to shore by fishermen after running out of fuel.
Thai police spokesman Lieutenant General Prawut Thawornsiri said the crackdown in people smuggling had prompted the rush of arrivals elsewhere.
“Yes, our crackdown is affecting the boats,” he told Reuters in Bangkok. “They are going to Indonesia. Why else would they go to Indonesia? It is so far. …Our job is to block the boats and not let them land on our shores.” (Reuters)
