A group of 65 Rohingya Muslims have been found on a shipwrecked boat off the coast of southern Thailand, navy officials said yesterday as authorities investigated whether they had been trafficked.
The boat was discovered early on Tuesday in the Tarutao Marine National Park in southern Thailand, about 400km from the border of Myanmar.
About 740,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar since a military crackdown in 2017 against the stateless minority in the Buddhist-majority country.
Most have escaped into overcrowded refugee camps in Bangladesh, while others have fallen prey to human trafficking rings as they seek better lives in Malaysia or Thailand.
There were 31 women and five children among the Rohingya on the shipwrecked boat, Thai Navy spokesman Vice Admiral Khan Deeubol said.
One Thai man and five Burmese citizens were also in the group.
The men said they were fishing in the area and had no link to the Rohingyas.
The six men “were detained for questioning because of their suspicious behavior,” Deeubol said.
A provincial official said the group was initially investigated for illegal entry, but the probe had broadened.
“Authorities are not ruling out other issues such as human trafficking,” an Internal Security Command source in Satun Province told reporters.
Photographs from the navy showed the group on a beach, some eating rice near the marooned ship.
Bangladeshi authorities have intercepted several suspected traffickers seeking to transport refugees from squalid camps in Cox’s Bazaar, where nearly 1 million Rohingyas are living — almost all refusing to go back to Myanmar out of fear for their safety and rights.
Myanmar has said the crackdown was aimed at rooting out insurgents who attacked military posts. It has signed a repatriation agreement with Bangladesh to return Rohingya refugees, but so far virtually none have volunteered to go back.
Tens of thousands of Filipino Catholics yesterday twirled white cloths and chanted “Viva, viva,” as a centuries-old statue of Jesus Christ was paraded through the streets of Manila in the nation’s biggest annual religious event. The day-long procession began before dawn, with barefoot volunteers pulling the heavy carriage through narrow streets where the devout waited in hopes of touching the icon, believed to hold miraculous powers. Thousands of police were deployed to manage crowds that officials believe could number in the millions by the time the statue reaches its home in central Manila’s Quiapo church around midnight. More than 800 people had sought
DENIAL: Pyongyang said a South Korean drone filmed unspecified areas in a North Korean border town, but Seoul said it did not operate drones on the dates it cited North Korea’s military accused South Korea of flying drones across the border between the nations this week, yesterday warning that the South would face consequences for its “unpardonable hysteria.” Seoul quickly denied the accusation, but the development is likely to further dim prospects for its efforts to restore ties with Pyongyang. North Korean forces used special electronic warfare assets on Sunday to bring down a South Korean drone flying over North Korea’s border town. The drone was equipped with two cameras that filmed unspecified areas, the General Staff of the North Korean People’s Army said in a statement. South Korea infiltrated another drone
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
RSS