A total of 150 Bangladeshi human trafficking victims, who were rescued on May 21 by the Myanmar Navy, have reached Bangladesh.
Six buses carrying the trafficking victims reached Bandarban district from Myanmar around 3pm Monday.
Earlier in the day, Myanmar Border Guard Police handed over the trafficking victims to Border Guard Bangladesh on the No Man’s Land, following a three-and-a-half-hour flag meeting between BGB and Myanmar Immigration and Registration Department.
Col Mohammad Khalequzzaman, BGB sector commander of Cox's Bazar, told journalists at a press meet that the victims were taken to a temporary camp at the Tumbru Primary School ground in Bandarban.
“Later, they will be taken to Cox’s Bazar Cultural Centre and will be handed over to relatives on Tuesday. The handing over process will start from the morning.”
Asked about the other 50 victims, who were believed to be Bangladeshis and are also among the 208 rescued trafficking victims, he said: “We are verifying their identities. They will be brought back once they are verified as Bangladeshi nationals.”
On May 21, Myanmar’s navy brought ashore 200 migrants – calling them Bangladeshis – found in a boat carrying 208 people off its coast.
Southeast Asia's migrant scandal began to unfurl at the start of May after a Thai crackdown on people smuggling threw the multi-million dollar industry into disarray.
It led gangmasters to abandon their victims on land and at sea, and images of stick-thin, dazed migrants trapped on boats or stumbling onto shores and out of forests shocked the world, heaping pressure on Southeast Asian nations to act.
The majority of the migrants are Rohinyga Muslims, who are pariahs in Myanmar's Buddhist-majority western Rakhine State. Some of them are also from Bangladesh.
Acknowledging it, the government of Bangladesh took immediate steps and expressed its readiness to take back all its trafficked victims stranded in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia within a month.