Thai immigration officials helping sell Rohingya refugees to traffickers
Immigration staff seen taking detainees in department truck to ship bound for Malaysia
Thai immigration officials were involved in the weekend sale of Rohingya detainees to people smugglers, according to sources, whose tips allowed the to witness part of the clandestine deal taking place.
The informants said a busload of Rohingya detainees was being sent 500 kilometres from a southern detention centre to the Thai-Myanmar border port of Ranong and provided the registration number. The saw a bus with the same number plate arrive at 2am on Saturday at Ranong, then saw an Immigration Department truck with the detainees aboard leave 12 hours later.
Sources said the truck offloaded them at a pier 12 kilometres away, from where long-tail boats moved them to a ship offshore.
The transfer could not have been a legitimate deportation of Rohingya back to Myanmar since that country refuses to acknowledge members of the Muslim ethnic minority as citizens and won't accept their repatriation.
Sources said immigration officials sold the Rohingya to Malaysian people smugglers.
Thai officials were evasive yesterday when asked about the fate of the Rohingya. Colonel Nattasit Maksuwan, the deputy chief of the Internal Security Operations Command in Satun province, referred the to immigration officials.
