By P Prem Kumar
KUALA LUMPUR
Malaysian police have discovered 139 graves of suspected human trafficking victims at 28 abandoned camps near the Thai border.
Police Chief Khalid Abu Bakar told reporters Monday that the graves – some believed to hold more than one body - are located in northern Perlis state, hundreds of meters from the trafficking camps and graves found by Thai police earlier this month.
"The operation which we have been conducting from May 11 to May 23, we [have] discovered 139 of what we believe are graves,” he said.
"It saddens me. I am also human. Even if it was just one person, it is still human trafficking and here we have 139 graves."
Security forces have found camps of different sizes, with the largest capable of accommodating 300 people and another 100, while the others could hold 10 to 20 people or less.
The presence of cooked food at some camps appeared to suggest they had been abandoned recently.
"There are old camps, maybe as far back as 2013," the police chief said of the sites, which were situated a few kilometers apart.
Experts have been dispatched to the area to exhume the bodies and perform necessary investigations.
Khalid told reporters that the camps were located in an area that authorities usually did not patrol.
"We don't patrol the area, which is hilly, and we had no information of people entering the country illegally from there,” he said. "There are also no passages in the area used for smuggling activities.”
He added that patrols focusing on the area had only begun after Thai police found gravesites across the border and began exchanging intelligence with Malaysian counterparts.
Vowing to hold those involved in trafficking to account, he said police had taken 37 people into custody across the country, mostly in northern states and the east coast.
Meanwhile, Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said a forensic team is working to determine whether the bodies belong to Rohingya or Bangladeshi victims.
While at the lobby of parliament, he added that Malaysian police would cooperate with their Thai counterparts to share information during the ongoing investigation.
Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Najib Razak had vowed to find the human trafficking syndicates believed to be behind the mass graves.
"I am deeply concerned with graves found on Malaysian soil purportedly connected to people smuggling. We will find those responsible,” he said.
A source from the prime minister’s office who wished to remain anonymous as he was not authorized to speak with media told Anadolu Agency that Razak - currently on a three-day visit to Japan - was receiving updates from the home ministry and the police force on the ongoing investigation in Padang Besar town.
The source said Razak has instructed Hamidi to work with his Thai counterpart to resolve the issue, and that if their efforts were unsuccessful, the prime ministers of both countries are expected to meet to discuss the matter.
On Sunday, Hamidi expressed shock at the discovery, saying the camps may have been in the area for five years.
“A grave maybe has three, four bodies. But we don’t know how many there are. We are probably going to find more bodies,” The Star Online quoted him as saying.
Earlier this month, the bodies of more than 30 migrants were discovered in southern Thailand, prompting a crackdown that led to smugglers fleeing and boatloads of the migrants then turning up on Thai, Indonesian and Malaysian shores, while thousands more remained at sea.
Last year, both Malaysia and Thailand were downgraded to Tier 3 status in the U.S. State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report for not complying with the "minimum standards" to deal with human trafficking.
