Arakan News Agency
Rohingya Muslims are heading criminal syndicates that smuggle thousands of people into Malaysia by sea, Malaysian Deputy Police Inspector-General Noor Rashid Ibrahim told RFA on Thursday.
“There are syndicates that smuggle thousands of them by boat. The syndicates are masterminded by Rohingya themselves,” he said in northern Perlis state.
That is where Malaysian authorities this week uncovered 28 human-smuggling camps and started excavating 139 graves of suspected migrants in the jungle along the Thai border.
Ibrahim revealed that some suspected members of one of these human-trafficking rings had been arrested and that the camps found at Bukit Wang Burma in Perlis were relatively new.
“If you look at the physical condition of the camps, the wood used to build the camp still looks new,” he said.
Elsewhere on Thursday, Deputy Home Minister Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar denied that Malaysians were masterminds of such illicit operations.
“They [Malaysians] might have knowledge of the trafficking activities and could be accomplices, but they are not the organizers,” The Star, a Malaysian news outlet, quoted him as saying.
According to a report published Thursday by the state-run Bernama news agency, a Rohingya known as “Yassin” was the main man behind the camps found in the jungle.
Bernama also carried an exclusive interview with a 25-year-old Rohingya man who said that he had escaped from one of those camps after being imprisoned there last year.
The interview reportedly took place in Alor Setar, the capital of Kedah state just south of Perlis.
“There was only one thing on my mind – death. I wanted to die because dying would be easier than living,” camp survivor Nurul Amin Nobi Hussein told Bernama.
He said he was confined to a cage that held between 200 to 300 people and that some 1,500 people were detained at his camp.
“I was locked up in a cage like the goats and chickens, and all the time, I was surrounded by death. Each day, five or six of us would die, either from illness or [they] were beaten up and shot,” he said.
Source :RFA
