Rohingya refugees 'gang-raped at Thailand-Malaysia camps'

Rohingya women who were taken hostage at human-trafficking camps in Thailand and Malaysia have been gang raped by their kidnappers, according to Malaysian media.

Survivors of the terrible ordeal said young women would be dragged away at night from the jungle camp, which lies near Padang Besar in Thailand, to a place where they would be gang raped by the guards.

Two young women became pregnant as a result of the sexual violence, one of the survivors, named as Nur Khaidha Abdul Shukur, told Malaysia's state-run Bernama news agency.

Her husband is also quoted as saying that similar crimes were taking place at nearby camps on the Malaysian side of the border.

"We heard the shrieks and cries of the women because the place they raped them was very close to our pens, but as the incidents were at night, we could not see what was happening," Nurul Amin Nobi Hussein said.

The discovery of human-trafficking camps and mass graves in the past few few months sent shockwaves in Southeast Asia, triggering a crackdown on smugglers and human traffickers by Thai authorities.

Seven camps were found in Thailand and 33 bodies in mass graves, AFP reported. Malaysia uncovered 28 camps and 139 graves, which are still being exhumed by Malaysian police forensic teams. Hundreds of victims of human traffickers may be buried there.

A badly decomposed body was found unburied in a shack at one of the camps. Police said the unidentified person had been dead for two or three weeks and Joe Millman, spokesman for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), predicted "hundreds more [bodies] will be found in the days to come".

Apparently abandoned in haste, the camp was little more than a tangle of bamboo and tarpaulin, but an official said it could have held up to 300 people.

Prisoners could be kept alive with water from a stream running through the gully where the now-abandoned camp was nestled.

Thai police have arrested 50 people, including some local officers. Malaysia said 12 of its police officers are being investigated for possible involvement in the human-trafficking ring.

Rohingya Muslims are stateless and live in segregated conditions in the western Rakhine state, where clashes with Buddhists in 2012 left about 200 people dead and tens of thousands displaced. They have been viewed as unwelcome migrants from Bangladesh during the last century by the Myanmar government and local Burmese.