POLICE SEIZE RELIEF GOODS OF ROHINGYA COMMUNITY AT BORDER

Shamlapur-Rohingya, 5 Dzulqa’dah 1434/9 September 2013 (MINA) – A team of police seized 60 sacks of rice and other commodities which will be to distribute it among the Rohingya people who have been living in Shamlapur village, under Teknaf police station on September 7, said Hussain, a local leader from the village.

On being tipped off, a group of police personnel from Shamlapur police camp went to a local businessman’s house and seized the relief on that day, at about 8:00 pm, after being an operation where the sacks of rice were stocked by an organization, according to police official.
According to police sources, the relief was to be distributed through a local leader of present government named Aziz Uddin from Shamlapur village under the Teknaf police station, Cox’s Bazar district.
Sources also said that many Rohingya refugees have been living at Shamplapur illegally, but their condition is very pathetic. They didn’t get any support from any quarter such as UNHCR and Government side.

Recently, some of foreign NGOs provided relief among the Rohingya people such as— rice, edible oil, biscuits, onion, clothes and etc…. said a local elder Abdullah (not real name).
Another local elder Harron also said, “Rohingya people have been taking shelter in Bangladesh after crossing the Naff River because of religious and political persecutions by the Burmese government in Arakan State, Burma.
In Bangladesh, they are facing many problems with family members as they don’t get daily works to support their family members.W

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On 2 September 2013, ‎Authorities in Thailand have captured the suspected leader of a human trafficking gang. Forty-two-year-old Ko Myo, from Myanmar later confessed to selling some migrants from his homeland into slavery on Thai fishing boats. He’s suspected of possibly murdering as many as seven people, a Thai official said.

Myo was shot and captured at a rubber plantation in southern Surat Thani during a raid by the Department of Special Investigation and local police. There had been increasing international concern over the trafficking of Myanmar migrants in Thailand’s lucrative fishing industry. The nation remains one of several sources of human slavery. The ongoing crisis could incur sanctions from the United States.

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An investigation published last month found human smugglers selling some Rohingya Muslims into slavery on Thai fishing boats. Countless Rohingya have fled Myanmar in recent months after violence with Buddhists, which is Myanmar’s majority religion.

“The murder charge is under further investigation, and it will be a time-consuming process to verify the bodies,” and so Ko Myo will face human trafficking charges first. A senior official in the human trafficking division of the DSI said Komvich Padhanarath, which is part of the Justice Ministry, verified this. Komvich said Ko Myo had confessed to trafficking and murder but not rape.

Ko Myo was named in a report by the Environmental Justice Foundation, a London-based non-government body funded by environmental advocacy groups, which called him a trafficker and implicated him in murder and rape.

Myanmar authorities will be contacted to identify other gang members and help apprehend brokers there, Komvich added.

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Rohingya who could not pay for their passage were handed by brokers to traffickers, who sometimes sold the men as indentured servants on farms or into slavery on Thai fishing boats.
Thai naval security forces may also had been involved in the people smuggling. The navy denied the charge, but the U.S. State Department said the Thai government should look into the allegations.

An annual State Department report monitoring global efforts to combat modern-day slavery over the past four years has kept Thailand on its “Tier-2 Watch List,” a notch above the worst offending nations such as North Korea. A drop to Tier 3 can trigger sanctions, including the blocking of World Bank aid.

In related news, around 261 Rohingya tried to escape from the center at Phang Nga this week but failed, although 30 managed on Friday to break out of a police station in Songkhla, also in the south, police said.(T/P08/P04)

Mi’raj News Agency (MINA)