by Our Foreign Desk

MALAYSIAN national police commander Khalid Abu Bakar revealed yesterday that abandoned jungle camps on the border with Thailand contain graves suspected of holding the bodies of 139 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar.

He said that the cluster of former camps near the town of Wang Kelian had been used by human traffickers responsible for building barbed-wire pens to cage migrants.

Mr Khalid said that forensics experts were exhuming 139 suspected graves found at 28 vacated camps in the hilly jungle area where trafficking syndicates were known to operate.

“It is a very sad scene. I am shocked. We never expected this kind of cruelty,” he said, noting that one of the camps had the capacity to deal with 300 migrants.

At one forest camp, police found several parts of a decomposed body inside a wooden pen, which district police commander Rizani Ismail said would be examined by forensics experts.

Police are begin digging up other suspected graves — mounds of earth, covered with leaves and marked by sticks — this morning.

“We have discovered 139 of what we believe to be graves. We believe they are victims of human trafficking,” said Mr Khalid.

Prime Minister Najib Razak vowed that the perpetrators would be caught.

“I am deeply concerned with graves found on Malaysian soil purportedly connected to people smuggling. We will find those responsible,” he said yesterday during an official visit to Tokyo.

The finding in the northern Malaysian state of Perlis follows a similar discovery earlier this month by police in Thailand who unearthed dozens of bodies from shallow graves on the Thai side of the border.

Thai police Major General Puthichart Ekkachan said that 36 bodies had been found there in seven abandoned camps.

The discoveries have exposed hidden networks of jungle camps run by human smugglers, who have held countless desperate people captive for years while extorting ransoms from their families.

Most of those who have fallen victim to the trafficking networks are members of Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya Muslim community, undocumented and impoverished migrants from Bangladesh.

Mr Khalid said that two camps appeared to have been abandoned within the past few weeks, based on the condition of items left behind.