DHAKA - Seventeen Bangladeshis finally returned home Thursday after being thrown off a boat bound for Malaysia and forced to swim two hours to shore, after attempting to join a migrant exodus, officials said.
The Bangladeshis had spent two months aboard the boat in the Bay of Bengal packed with migrants fleeing poverty to Southeast Asia, before they were thrown overboard in the early hours of Thursday.
After two hours in the water, they finally reached shore in neigbouring Mynamar, seeking refuge in a village before authorities were alerted, Border Guard Bangladesh commander Abujar al-Jahid said.
“All 17 of the returnees are Bangladeshi nationals. They looked emaciated. They said they were thrown from a Malaysia-bound Thai human smuggling ship,” he told AFP.
Malaysia and Indonesia had until Wednesday refused to take in boats overloaded with persecuted Muslim Rohingya from Myanmar and Bangladeshi economic migrants, but relented on that policy after strong international criticism.
Nearly 3,000 have swum to shore or been rescued over the past 10 days after a Thai crackdown on human-trafficking threw the illicit trade into chaos, with some of the syndicates involved abandoning their helpless human cargo at sea.
One of the Bangladeshis, Mohammad Nabi, said smugglers had forced him to call home and ask relatives to give 70,000 taka ($900) to intermediaries.
“Some 37 of us who paid them the money were pushed off the ship before dawn. We then swam for about two hours,” Nabi said, adding that only 27 of them made it to shore.
Speaking from the southern Bangladesh coastal district of Cox’s Bazar where he is now in police custody, Nabi said the smugglers gave him and around 200 others on board one cup of rice a day each and dried chillies during their two-month ordeal.
“They (the smugglers) used to tell us that things have heated up in Thailand and it was not possible for the ship to make a journey to Malaysia,” he said by phone from a police station.
Coast Guard officer Shahidul Islam said Bangladesh has stepped up patrols of its waters in a bid to rescue whose stranded on boats off the coast.