‘It’s a horrific journey’
When hundreds of Rohingya refugees paid traffickers to escape their squalid camp in Bangladesh, they were promised a new life in Malaysia after just one week at sea.
Instead, the group of mostly women and children suffered more than 200 days of terror on the high seas, until they landed this week on Indonesia's northern coast, where they are now back in refugee tents.
Beaten by the traffickers, they battled hunger and thirst as storms lashed their wooden vessel, and watched in horror as the corpses of scores who died were tossed overboard, according to survivor accounts.
"We were told that we'd reach Malaysia in seven or eight days, but we floated in the water for months," one male survivor told AFP from a makeshift tent camp on Indonesia's Sumatra island.
Kamrun Nahar, another survivor, said she lost count of how many bodies were thrown into the sea, adding "mothers and their children died" after succumbing to illness.
The new accounts -- and those of nearly 100 Rohingya who landed in Indonesia in June -- suggest some 800 migrants left Bangladesh on a large boat around March before being split onto smaller vessels.
Many paid up to $2,400 to get aboard, but smugglers held them hostage for months in order to extort more money from their friends and relatives, survivors and aid agencies said.
Despite their ordeal, the group looked relatively healthy, suggesting that traffickers had an interest in keeping them alive.
"It's a horrific journey, it's very unpredictable", another survivor told AFP.
Experts say some smuggling boats are fitted with desalinisation machines to produce potable water during the hazardous crossings.
But the latest arrivals said they were fed little more than a handful of rice and a glass of water each day.
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