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Suffocated Burmese found in container in Thailand: police

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.
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