BALI (Sputnik) – The mass graves of migrants recently found close to the Thai border in Malaysia are at least five years old, the country's home minister announced, saying that police continue to unearth more bodies.
"It looks like they have been here for quite some time. At least five years, I would say," Malaysian Minister of Home Affairs Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said as quoted by the Star newspaper on Monday.
The mass graves were discovered in Malaysia earlier this month, near detention camps that officials believe were run by Thais and were used to hold human trafficking victims brought into the country.
Thousands of Bangladeshi refugees, as well as Rohingya Muslims persecuted in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, are fleeing their countries of origin hoping to escape poverty and horrible living conditions by reaching the shores of Thailand, Malaysia or Indonesia.
According to Hamidi, Malaysians, as well as recruitment agents from Myanmar and Bangladesh, are likely to be involved in human trafficking operations that have left hundreds of migrants, too sick to make it, buried in mass graves.
Some 25,000 Rohingya and Bangladeshis boarded smugglers' boats in the first quarter of 2015, according to the UN Refugee Agency, which is almost twice as many as in the same period of last year.
