Eighteen trafficking victims, who were rescued from the Andaman Sea by the Indonesian authorities around three months ago, have reached Dhaka.
A flight of Malaysia Airlines carrying the Bangladeshi migrants landed at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport from Jakarta early Friday.
Anindya Dutta of International Organization for Migration’s Dhaka office told the Dhaka Tribune: “We have repatriated 18 people in the first phase after their nationalities were confirmed. The IOM arranged their repatriation upon Bangladesh government’s request.
“We will bring back all Bangladeshi trafficking victims from the country once their identities are confirmed.”
Mr Dutta further informed that the 18 people hailed from Sylhet, Narsingdi, Jessore, Chuadanga, and Satkhira.
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.
