BANGKOK —

Fifty-four illegal workers from Myanmar suffocated to death in a cold storage truck as they were on the way to work in Thailand’s resort island Phuket, Thai police said Thursday. The truck with a frozen seafood container on the rear carried at least 121 Myanmar migrants, but the air-conditioning system was not working, local police said. Some passengers alerted the driver and he stopped on a highway in Ranong Province, the police added.

The incident was the deadliest in a wave of recent tragedies as people flee economic collapse in military-ruled Myanmar and search for work in Thailand, where they often end up abused and exploited.

Police said that 121 people had been crammed inside an airtight frozen seafood container measuring six meters long and 2.2 meters wide.

Colonel Kraithong Chanthongbai, local police commander in southern Ranong province on Myanmar’s border where the bodies were found late Wednesday, said the men and women were trying to get to Phuket island to work as day laborers.

But before they reached their final destination, 37 women and 17 men had suffocated to death in the stifling box with a broken ventilation system.

“The people said they tried to bang on the walls of the container to tell the driver they were dying, but he told them to shut up as police would hear them when they crossed through checkpoints inside Thailand,” Kraithong said.

One female survivor told Thai television: “No matter how many times we hit the container, the driver did not pay any attention.”

When the truck driver realised some of the migrants had died, he parked by the side of the road, opened the door to the storage box and fled, Kraithong said. Police were still searching for him.

Ten of the migrants remain in hospital suffering from dehydration and lack of oxygen, a hospital worker said, while the dead have been buried in temporary graves in Phuket until their bodies are claimed by relatives.

The 57 migrants who escaped unharmed or were released from hospital have been arrested, Kraithong said.

The Myanmar nationals, who were likely to be deported, had agreed to pay a Thai smuggling ring 5,000 baht ($157) each for the journey.

About 540,000 migrant workers are registered to work in Thailand, most of them from Myanmar, labor ministry figures show, but as many as one million undocumented workers are believed to be in the kingdom.

“Their own country has been made into a pauper state by the military,” said David Mathieson, Myanmar consultant for New York-based Human Rights Watch.

The migrants flee low wages, high unemployment, poor education and harassment by the military in the country formally known as Burma, he said, often only to face abuse, persecution and exploitation in Thailand.

“A lot of people from Burma would much rather come and work in a factory in Thailand in desperate conditions with low pay rather than have to do forced labor and have things stolen from them by the Burmese army,” he said.

Myanmar is one of the world’s poorest countries, its economy battered by decades of mismanagement under military rule and further hampered by Western sanctions imposed over the junta’s human rights record.

Wire reports

› Login to comment

4 Comments

• 

  Jyan_Bon at 01:39 AM JST - 11th April

  This kind of tragic accidents have been going on ...and will continue to happen in Myanmar, untill the military junta plug-up it's courage to have dialogue with the election winning party, NLD and the leaders of the ethnic nationals.

• 

  Coppell at 06:57 PM JST - 11th April

  God bless them.

• 

  GrouchyGaijin at 08:44 PM JST - 11th April

  If they had oil, "you know who" would be in there blessing them with democracy. Like Darfur, the DPRK, Zimbabwe etc. etc. etc!

• 

  Sarge at 10:26 PM JST - 11th April

  "If they had oil, "you know who" would be in there blessing them with democracy. Like Darfur, the DPRK, Zimbabwe etc. etc. etc." blah blah blah

  Yeah, well, I don't see anyone from GrouchyGaijin's country, whatever it is, blessing Myanmar, Darfur, the DPRK, Zimbabwe etc. etc. etc. with democracy.

Register or Login to leave a comment