They saw death closely

They saw their fellows dying one by one from severe thirst, hunger and torture by human traffickers on the sea. Some of them looked half-dead and they never believed they would return home alive.

A number of Bangladeshis among 61 trafficking victims, who returned to Dhaka on Thursday from Kuala Lumpur, shared their ordeal with The Daily Star at the Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport.

“Two brothers boarded our ship together. One of them died in the sea after the traffickers had brutally beaten him up. The other brother could not do anything out of fear for his own life,” said Shamsul Alam, one of the returnees.

Shamsul faced horrible ordeal on that ship for more than two months after he had left his village home in Jhenidah's Sadar upazila. “The traffickers threw a man into the sea as he became seriously ill. It was very shocking to us but very normal to them [traffickers]. They had no feelings,” added Shamsul.

The 35-year-old also said he had reached Cox's Bazar at the end of February and was later taken to a fishing boat along with others in the first week of March. “After two weeks, we joined a group of around 800 passengers in a large ship,” he said.

Initially, the traffickers used to provide them with rice twice a day. Later, they served noodles and fried rice. But the food supply was stopped totally when the ship was in the middle of the sea.

“At one stage, the traffickers started torturing the jobseekers for ransom. Every day, they beat some of us up. When I understood that my life was at stake, I made a call to my home to pay them Tk 2.5 lakh through a bKash account,” Shamsul mentioned.

However, he lost all hopes when the traffickers intensified tortures on the jobseekers. “I lost my physical and mental strength. My eyes were so dry that I could not even cry despite facing their brutalities,” Shamsul added.

“If any of us wanted to know when the journey would end, they would make fun of us saying the ship would never anchor,” he recalled.

Their nightmares did not end there. When the traffickers failed to anchor the ship near the Thai-Malaysia border, they abandoned the ship leaving the jobseekers on their own.

“I thought my life has finally come to its end. I cannot remember what happened to me for two to three days after the traffickers had abandoned us in the sea,” he said.

Hazrat Ali, another returnee who hailed from Sadar upazila in Narsingdi, said the traffickers used barbaric methods to torture the jobseekers. “For more than two and a half months in the sea, they never allowed us to use the toilet. They forced us to urinate where we had to stay together,” he said.

If anybody ever tried to argue with them on any issue, he was taken to a room and beaten up brutally. “None of us dared to protest against their brutality. We had been their slaves, actually,” Hazrat said.

He now believes it was a thousand times better to earn a living by pulling rickshaws at home than to illegally try for a job abroad.

Rajib and Mostafa Kamal, two youths under 18 from Maheshpur upazila of Jhenidah, were lured by a broker from Chowgachha upazila of Jessore to take the perilous journey to Malaysia. They along with two of their relatives left home in March without informing their parents.

“We were students of class nine at a local madrassa. A broker convinced us that we could reach Malaysia by ship in exchange of a little amount,” Kamal said.

They had no contacts with their families until the police had informed them last month. Finally they returned home and will be reunited with their parents.

The returnees alleged that the local brokers had close connection with the human traffickers and even the law enforcement agencies. Such human trafficking through the Bay of Bengal cannot be checked until the government shows determination in this regard, they said.

Bangladesh High Commissioner to Malaysia Md Shahidul Islam said they would send back the rest 614 rescued migrants before the Eid-ul-Fitr.