The horrific exploitation of human beings by traffickers, as detailed in a report published by this newspaper yesterday, calls for increased vigilance against this menace. The report describes how a 23-year-old Bangladeshi man was held captive and tortured mercilessly in Libya by a group of human traffickers, who were luckily apprehended by the authorities.

The traffickers had seized the man's passport, filmed torturing him and used the videos they had captured to force his brother to repeatedly pay them exorbitant extortion fees in return for his release which was never to come. What is worrying is that numerous other similar stories have come to light recently, which gives the impression that the problem has only been metastasising over the years, perhaps in the absence of proper government monitoring and lack of preventive measures.

This is, at least, what was opined in the US Human Trafficking Report 2017, which downgraded Bangladesh to the Tier 2 Watch List as its government did not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking. The observation of the report that "official complicity in trafficking crimes remained a serious problem" needs urgent attention. Regrettably, the government has not rehabilitated the victims as per their specific needs and did not even provide rehabilitation for adult male victims.

As mentioned before in this column, human trafficking will continue to thrive until the government takes measures to stop it. There are a number of recommendations in the US Human Trafficking Report 2017, which the government should consider to end human trafficking for good and to bring the perpetrators of such a barbaric practice to justice.