On Thursday morning, 16-year-old Ibrahim Ali from Chuadanga was preparing to go to work as usual when he got a call in his mobile phone.
“The caller identified himself as Monohor asked me whether I was interested to migrate to Malaysia without spending a penny,” Ibrahim said.
“My family is very poor. After my father’s premature death, I had to drop out of school and take over the responsibility of earning a living for my mother and sister. It was an unexpected offer and I could not turn it down. But I had no idea that such a disaster would come down on me,” the teenager said.
Ibrahim was detained in Chittagong along with trafficers by a team of RAB yesterday.
“I left home on Friday for Chittagong along with two of my friends Ariful and Mosharraf. A person received us in Chittagong. We were about to leave for Cox’s Bazar when RAB members detained us and brought us to Dhaka,” Ibrahim said yesterday while sharing his experiences with the Dhaka Tribune.
“They only wanted our families to pay them Tk1 lakh after we reached Malaysia and a further Tk90,000 after we got work there. But who knew that they would turn out to be frauds,” he said.
Ibrahim does not have any idea how in the world have these people got his mobile number. He also does not remember talking to anyone about going to Malaysia ever.
RAB officials said a racket of field-level brokers collect information about poor people living in the rural areas who are struggling to make a decent living. Then they call them up and convince them to go abroad, hold them hostage there and collect ransom from their families.
At the RAB headquarters in Uttara of Dhaka, this reporter yesterday met another person named Anisur Rahman who said his teenage son was now in Malaysia as a hostage of the human traffickers.
“The traffickers lured my son into going to Malaysia. Immediately after he arrived there, he was taken hostage by the traffickers. Now they are demanding Tk2.3 lakh as ransom for releasing my son. They said if I do not pay, I will never see my son again,” Anisur said.
He also said that he had filed a complaint with RAB and the officials are now trying to bring his son back home.
In a drive in Chittagong yesterday, RAB rescued 12 people who were about to go to Cox’s Bazar and leave for Malaysia on boats.
Meanwhile, in separate drives, members of Bangladesh Coast Guard and police yesterday rescued 47 others from Teknaf and Maheshkhali upazilas of Cox’s Bazar.
