Bangkok: Hundreds of starving migrants have pleaded for urgent rescue after they were abandoned by smugglers on a boat in waters believed to be near both Thailand and Malaysia, an activist said on Tuesday.
The Arakan Project, which monitors migrant journeys across the Bay of Bengal, said it had spoken by telephone to Rohingya migrants on board the vessel on Tuesday afternoon.
The boat, which is believed to be carrying around 350 people including dozens of women and children, was cast adrift by a Thai smuggling gang who fled the vessel after disabling the ship’s engine on Sunday.
“They told us they have had no food and water for the last three days. They have called for urgent rescue,” said Chris Lewa, the founder of the Arakan Project.
The migrants, she added, were unsure of their exact location and believed they were in waters close to Thailand’s southern border with Malaysia.
“But they say they can see the coastline, so we know they are close to the shore,” Lewa said.
“They say there are also quite a lot of boats in the area and that they have been making distress signals all day but no one has responded to them,” she added.
The migrants were reached on a mobile phone with a Thai number and said there were 50 women and 84 children on board the vessel.
Migrant groups and the UN have warned that thousands of migrants are believed to be stranded at sea without food and water and could die unless Southeast Asian governments act urgently to rescue them.
The crisis comes as Thailand cracks down on the human-trafficking trade following the discovery of dozens of graves at remote jungle camps in the country’s south bordering Malaysia.
That has forced smugglers to change their routes and abandon their victims, campaigners say.
Despite the escalating alarm, Indonesia’s navy said it had turned away one boat carrying hundreds of migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh to an uncertain fate.
Nearly 2,000 boat people from Myanmar and Bangladesh — including many ethnic Rohingya — have swum ashore, been rescued or intercepted off Malaysia and Indonesia in recent days, many of them thin, weak or in poor health after weeks at sea.
Thailand’s national police spokesman Prawut Thavornsiri told AFP on Tuesday aviation police were using helicopters to scour the Andaman Sea for migrant boats.
Marine police were also patrolling the shore, he said, adding: “We have to close off the tap. We have to block them.”
He added that no new boats have been detected at the southern Thai entry points of Ranong and Satun, which are often used by traffickers, since the recent crackdown.