Footage Shows Smugglers Beating Rohingya Refugees on Trafficking Boat

Filmed on a mobile phone by a smuggler who later fled the vessel, the video shows dozens of asylum seekers, including children, sitting in the hull and on the deck as smugglers stand among them.

An argument starts and one of the traffickers, holding a thick rope in one hand, pushes a Rohingya man back and kicks him.

He then uses what appears to be a whip with his other hand to repeatedly lash a group of shirtless men who scramble to avoid the beating.

“They started beating us because we complained about the food,” Mohammad Osman, a 16-year-old passenger, said in an interview at a Bangladesh refugee camp conducted as part of a months-long AFP investigation into the people-smuggling network.

“They randomly beat us just because we were asking for more rice and water.”

Osman’s neighbour, Enamul Hasan, 19, who was also on the ship, said he grabbed the phone after one of the traffickers left it behind when fleeing onto another vessel during what amounted to a mutiny.

The footage was shot several days before the group’s Malaysia-bound boat returned to Bangladesh in mid-April, he said. It had departed in February.

Earlier beatings, which were not captured on video, saw some Rohingya die at the hands of the smugglers, Hasan said at the refugee camp.

Hasan and Osman said 46 people on their vessel died from beatings, starvation and illness, giving breakdowns of men, women and children who perished.

A third surviving passenger separately retold similar events.

AFP also confirmed that Hasan and Osman were in the video footage. They could be seen huddling among the group of men who were being hit.

Hasan described how the crew, ethnic Burmese from Myanmar, eventually fled after some of the passengers began to resist.

The refugees had initially kept pleading to be taken to land as they tried to survive on starvation rations of rice and water, he added.

The crew responded to the mutiny by threatening to set the boat on fire, according to Hasan. “They kept saying they’d burn us alive so we became silent again,” he said.

A small boat showed up a few days later and all but two of the traffickers fled, he added.

“Those two traffickers told us not to rebel, that they would drop us where they could,” Hasan said.

“A couple of days later they left us back near Bangladesh and fled.”

tasnim