Police found eight camps housing migrants from several Southeast Asian countries on Wednesday in addition to what appeared to be an illegal immigrant cemetery in southern Thailand, Efe news agency reported.
Mostly in the Songkhla province, situated along the Malaysian border, the camps had been abandoned by the traffickers, as security forces have launched raids against them throughout the month.
Authorities have identified 312 Myanmarese and Bangladeshis among the inhabitants of the camps, while a document reviewed by Efe revealed that 80 among them were Rohingyas, a Muslim minority group from Myanmar.
While all of them were illegal immigrants, only 63 were victims of human trafficking.
Human trafficking has emerged as a surging humanitarian crisis in the region, while the police have arrested roughly 20 people over the last two weeks, mostly officials and civil servants, and two police officers, while 30 more remain at large.
Fleeing poverty in their native countries, Myanmarese and Bangladeshi migrants routinely embark on ships in the Indian Ocean to head for Malaysia and Indonesia, transiting through Thailand.
Often, the migrants are jailed on board ships or illegal camps for months at a time in Thailand, suffering abuses and scarcity of food.
At the same time, many of them are Rohingyas, whom the UN calls among the most persecuted minorities in the world.
Indo-Asian News Service
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