Seven bodies, five of them women and one a girl, were brought out of the sea by Malaysian crews on Sunday. Thirteen people were found alive. Hundreds more have not been found.
A boat carrying Rohingya who had fled Myanmar capsized close to the maritime border between Thailand and Malaysia. Thai officials later said they had recovered four more bodies, two of them children, which put the confirmed dead at no fewer than 11. The vessel went down off Thailand’s Ko Tarutao island, just north of Malaysia’s Langkawi.
Three days at sea
Officials say the boat held about 70 people. It was one of several vessels that left Myanmar’s Rakhine state three days earlier with roughly 300 Rohingya in all. Near the border the group was told to switch to three smaller boats, each holding around 100, Kedah state police chief Adzli Abu Shah told local media.
Two of those boats are still unaccounted for. Adzli said police had asked the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency and the Marine Police to search for them. Crews are combing 583 sq km (225 sq miles) of water near Langkawi. The agency’s images showed one survivor lying under a sheet and another on a stretcher as rescuers worked.
Romli Mustafa, who heads the agency in the region and gave the survivor count, pointed to the people behind such voyages. “Cross-border syndicates are now increasingly active in exploiting migrants by making them victims of human trafficking using high-risk sea routes,” he said. Reports suggest traffickers charge up to $3,500 per person.
Why they keep going
Al Jazeera’s Rob McBride, reporting from Kuala Lumpur, said the migrants were believed to have set out from the Myanmar coast about three days before the sinking, mostly Rohingya. “This is a well-used maritime route sailing down the coast of Thailand, heading towards Malaysia, where they will hope to start a new life, where, often, they will have relatives and acquaintances who are already here in Malaysia,” he said.
For families on both sides of that journey, the pull is simple. Rohingya, a mainly Muslim minority, are denied citizenship in mostly Buddhist Myanmar and are treated there as foreign interlopers from South Asia. Nearly one million Rohingya refugees live in cramped camps across southern Bangladesh. Myanmar has also been in a civil war since the 2021 coup, when the military pushed out the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi.
“According to the authorities, the situation in Myanmar, with the increased instability and also the ongoing civil war, is forcing people to take ever more desperate maritime journeys to try and start a new life,” McBride said. “And as we’ve seen in this case, some of those journeys end with very tragic consequences.”
Capsizings along this coast are frequent. In December 2021, more than 20 people drowned in several separate incidents off Malaysia, one of the worst on record.
Sources
- Eleven dead, hundreds missing after refugee boat sinks off Malaysian coast
- Families search for hundreds missing after Malaysia‑bound Rohingya boat sinks in Andaman Sea
