Fifty-four Burmese migrants have suffocated to death in a cold storage container while being smuggled to Thailand to escape desperate conditions at home, Thai police said yesterday.
Police said that 121 people had been crammed inside an airtight frozen seafood container measuring 6m long and 2.2m wide.
Colonel Kraithong Chanthongbai, police commander in Ranong Province on Myanmar’s border, where the bodies were found late on Wednesday, said the men and women were trying to get to Phuket to work as day laborers.
But before they reached their final destination, 37 women and 17 men had suffocated 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.
When the truck driver realized 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.
A Chinese freighter that allegedly snapped an undersea cable linking Taiwan proper to Penghu County is suspected of being owned by a Chinese state-run company and had docked at the ports of Kaohsiung and Keelung for three months using different names. On Tuesday last week, the Togo-flagged freighter Hong Tai 58 (宏泰58號) and its Chinese crew were detained after the Taipei-Penghu No. 3 submarine cable was severed. When the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) first attempted to detain the ship on grounds of possible sabotage, its crew said the ship’s name was Hong Tai 168, although the Automatic Identification System (AIS)
CHANGE OF MIND: The Chinese crew at first showed a willingness to cooperate, but later regretted that when the ship arrived at the port and refused to enter Togolese Republic-registered Chinese freighter Hong Tai (宏泰號) and its crew have been detained on suspicion of deliberately damaging a submarine cable connecting Taiwan proper and Penghu County, the Coast Guard Administration said in a statement yesterday. The case would be subject to a “national security-level investigation” by the Tainan District Prosecutors’ Office, it added. The administration said that it had been monitoring the ship since 7:10pm on Saturday when it appeared to be loitering in waters about 6 nautical miles (11km) northwest of Tainan’s Chiang Chun Fishing Port, adding that the ship’s location was about 0.5 nautical miles north of the No.
An Akizuki-class destroyer last month made the first-ever solo transit of a Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force ship through the Taiwan Strait, Japanese government officials with knowledge of the matter said yesterday. The JS Akizuki carried out a north-to-south transit through the Taiwan Strait on Feb. 5 as it sailed to the South China Sea to participate in a joint exercise with US, Australian and Philippine forces that day. The Japanese destroyer JS Sazanami in September last year made the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s first-ever transit through the Taiwan Strait, but it was joined by vessels from New Zealand and Australia,
COORDINATION, ASSURANCE: Separately, representatives reintroduced a bill that asks the state department to review guidelines on how the US engages with Taiwan US senators on Tuesday introduced the Taiwan travel and tourism coordination act, which they said would bolster bilateral travel and cooperation. The bill, proposed by US senators Marsha Blackburn and Brian Schatz, seeks to establish “robust security screenings for those traveling to the US from Asia, open new markets for American industry, and strengthen the economic partnership between the US and Taiwan,” they said in a statement. “Travel and tourism play a crucial role in a nation’s economic security,” but Taiwan faces “pressure and coercion from the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]” in this sector, the statement said. As Taiwan is a “vital trading
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