Koh Lipe , Thailand---Around $1,100 should have secured passage for each of the Rohingya migrants who were found adrift in the Andaman Sea -- victims of a dark trade in humans that pivots around smuggling kingpins in Thailand's south.
From the heaving bow of a wooden boat packed with emaciated and bedraggled fellow Rohingya, Mohammad Salim, 30, said his brother had the 4,000 Malaysian ringgit ($1,120) demanded by the brokers -- if he made it.
"I haven't paid anything yet... we just want to get to Malaysia," he said.
As ruthless trafficking networks have splintered, the desperate migrants have been left weak and starving on board the boat, which AFP found several kilometres (miles) off the southern Thai island of Koh Lipe. Traffickers are also known to travel with the boats
Provided with food and water, and its engine fixed, the boat left Thai waters early Friday, in line with the kingdom's policy of stopping the migrants from settling in Thailand. Its location is now unknown.
The pay-on-arrival deal described by Salim is favoured by some smuggling networks which start in western Myanmar -- where the stateless Muslim Rohingya live in desperate conditions -- and the adjacent poor coastal areas of Bangladesh.
They reach hundreds of kilometres down to the Thai south and beyond.
In recent months, the gangs appear to have adjusted their tactics to offer cheap, or even free, sea transit south.
Rights groups say the real money is made in southern Thailand, where brokers hold the human cargo in jungle camps or safe houses awaiting release payments of around $2,000 from relatives or friends, or sell them on in bulk to farms and businesses in Malaysia.
A boatload of 400 people -- recruited, duped or even kidnapped -- could be worth up to $800,000, according to anti-trafficking group Freeland Foundation, which has helped Thai police investigate the illicit industry.
Salim and his fellow passengers could not have known when they set out from Myanmar for Malaysia that the Thais were about to close many well-worn smuggling routes through their territory.
AFP
