Thai authorities resume dig at migrant mass grave site
Thai authorities on Saturday resumed the excavation of a mass grave site in a remote patch of jungle where migrants believed to be from Myanmar and Bangladesh were held for months by people smugglers in appalling conditions.
Eight bodies have been recovered so far from the abandoned camp in Sadao district, in Thailand's Songkhla province bordering Malaysia, but efforts to dig up the remainder of the 30 graves were hampered overnight by heavy rain.
The cause of their deaths is not yet clear, but further grim details emerged Saturday of the conditions endured by the migrants, in what Thailand's police chief has described as a "virtual prison camp" where migrants were held in makeshift bamboo cages.
Doctors treating the two sole survivors -- men aged 25 and 35-years-old -- told AFP their patients were suffering from a range of ailments.
"Both are malnourished, have scabies and lice," doctor Kwanwilai Chotpitchayanku told AFP at Padang Besar hospital.
"The older man could not walk, he had to be carried off the mountain. He hadn't eaten anything for two days before he was found. He told the translator he had a fever in the jungle for two months."
Doctors said the men had not been fully identified but were from either Bangladesh or Myanmar.
Both men were rigged to IV drips and were frail despite their young ages, according to an AFP reporter.
The border zone with Malaysia is criss-crossed by trafficking trails and is notorious for its network of secret camps where smuggled migrants are held, usually against their will, until relatives pay up hefty ransoms.
"The camp is located high up on a hill," Police General Aek Angsananont, national police deputy commissioner, told AFP, adding exhumations of the shallow graves had resumed on Saturday.
A rescue workers told AFP four of the dead were "skeletons" while the fifth died just a few days ago, seeming to indicate the camp had been in existence for some time.