Pressure mounted on Thailand on Monday
to come clean on allegations the army towed Rohingya refugees out to
sea and abandoned them in boats without engines, after CNN showed
pictures depicting exactly that.
The cable news channel also
interviewed a Rohingya man captured on one remote Thai island in the
Andaman Sea, who said he had been on one of six boats that arrived in
December carrying the migrants from the northwest of neighbouring
Myanmar.
The boats were towed back out to sea in January but
five of them sank, the visibly distressed man said in a mixture of
broken English and sign language.
"All men ... dead,"
said the man, identified as Iqbal Hussein, corroborating other
survivors' reports of boats cut adrift without engines and hundreds
of migrants left to die.
The government's chief spokesman
declined immediate comment on the issue of the Rohingya, a Muslim
minority who have fled decades of persecution at the hands of
Myanmar's military rulers into neighbouring Bangladesh.
More
than 230,000 are now in Bangladesh, according to the United Nations
refugee agency, and tens of thousands more have fled, often in
rickety wooden boats, in search of a better life elsewhere. Many have
ended up in Malaysia.
Rohingya rights groups and survivors who
washed up on India's Andaman Islands and Aceh in Indonesia in the
last four weeks say 992 migrants were towed out in two separate
episodes in December.
Of the 992, 550 are thought to be
missing, feared drowned. The army colonel at the centre of the abuse
allegations has denied any wrongdoing, saying the migrants were given
food and water and helped on their way after Thai villagers repaired
their boats.
Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has promised a
full investigation, but he has also issued a blanket denial, on
behalf of the military, of any abuse.
The United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said last week it believed 126
other Rohingyas were still in Thai military custody, but it has got
nowhere with a formal request lodged six days ago with the government
to see them.
Fears are growing that they, too, might have been
forced into boats and dumped at sea.
"We don't know where
they are," UNHCR spokeswoman Kitty McKinsey said.
Source: http://in.reuters.com/article/domest...BrandChannel=0
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