150 return home today

Myanmar today will repatriate 150 Bangladeshis who were rescued from the Bay of Bengal by its navy on May 21, says a Border Guard Bangladesh official.

On that day, 208 boatpeople were rescued while being trafficked into Malaysia. The rest are believed to be Rohingyas.

Initially, Myanmar authorities maintained that all the victims were “Bangladeshis”.

But following verification by Bangladesh's foreign and home ministries, only 150 were identified as citizens of this country, said Col Mohammad Khalequzzaman, BGB sector commander of Cox's Bazar.

Among them, 55 are from Narsingdi, 34 from Cox's Bazar and the rest from 11 other districts, reports our Cox's Bazar correspondent.

Khalequzzaman said the Myanmar Border Guard Police (BGP) would hand over the Bangladeshis to the BGB at the Tumbru border point in Bandarban after a flag meeting at Dekibania in Myanmar around 10:00am.

The repatriation takes place amid a regional crisis of human trafficking through the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea. The crisis unfolded in the first week of last month when Thailand found mass graves of “trafficking victims” in its southern Songkhla province.

Later, Thai authorities began a crackdown on those involved in the transnational crime. 

Towards the end of that month, Malaysia also discovered over a hundred graves in Padang Besar, which has a border with southern Thailand.

Since the crackdown, several thousand boatpeople -- believed to be Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar and Bangladeshis -- have been rescued off the coasts of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Myanmar.

In the latest incident, Myanmar's navy seized a boat packed with 727 people off the country's southern coast on May 29.

Some 2,500 boatpeople are still believed to be drifting in the sea, according to regional migrants' rights bodies.

After their rescue, many of the trafficking victims claimed that they were Bangladeshis while sources said Bangladesh was working to verify their nationalities.

Meanwhile, The Nation newspaper of Thailand yesterday reported that local police would wrap up their investigation into the trafficking of Rohingya and other migrants within two weeks and seek an indictment of the suspects.

Deputy National Police Chief Gen Aek Angsananont said the Thai authorities so far had issued arrest warrants for 84 suspects in human-trafficking cases.

ARREST IN COX'S BAZAR

Police arrested four “listed” human-trafficking suspects at their homes in Sabrang of Teknaf upazila early yesterday.

The arrestees are Saddam Hossain, 20, Mohammad Amin, 35, Mohammad Hasan, 32, and Syed Ahmad.

Ataur Rahman, officer-in-charge of Teknaf Police Station, said the four were produced before a court, which sent them to jail.