PHUKET: A group of 88 Rohingya boatpeople were apprehended and brought to shore north of Phuket yesterday under the gaze of the international media, the BBC and Aljazeera.

The boatpeople, including eight children and 10 women, will be assessed as Thailand reviews its policy towards hundreds of Rohingya still arriving by sea or recently ''rescued'' from people traffickers' secret camps.

One pregnant woman and her husband were sent to a small local hospital after the boat was spotted by local villagers off Pra Thong Island, near the large fishing township of Kuraburi in Phang Nga province.

The others in the boat were transferred to Kuraburi Police Station where the BBC, Aljazeera and Phuketwan photographed and interviewed them.

What emerged was a saga of enduring persecution by the Burmese Army. These people are all neighbors from the village of Debeng, near the town of Sittwe, where so-called ''community violence'' has targetted the oppressed and stateless Muslim minority.

Burmese soldiers and local police held the Rohingya of Debeng powerless at gunpoint while their Buddhist neighbors torched their homes, the newly-arrived boatpeople said today.

Life in the weeks that followed under the gun included regular sexual abuse by soldiers, women among the group said.

One man, Mamuta, 40, said that after months of living in squalid camps near the ruins of their homes, the neighbors banded together, with each contributing what they could afford towards passages on a traffickers' boat.

After 12 days at sea, the boat was apprehended by island fishermen about 10am yesterday and by 3pm the families were talking to the international media in Thailand.

The deputy Superintendent of Kuraburi Station, Colonel Laksanawong Rampansuwan, said that the Internal Security Operations Command, which oversees Thailand's border security, has been told of the arrest of the boatpeople.

It was the second boat apprehended off Kuraburi already this year, he said.

Other boats have been sighted or come ashore all along the Andaman coast, including a group of 73 men, women and children whose boat ran out of fuel near Phuket on January 1.

The arrival of the latest boat comes with final arrangements being made for possible access by the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, to hundreds of people believed to be Rohingya who were being held in secret camps along the Thai-Malaysia border.

Raids freed more than 850 from three camps last week. Those people are now being held in detention in refuge centres, Immigration offices and police cells throughout the Thai border province of Songkhla.

Since June, ethnic cleansing inside Burma has triggered a huge increase in the numbers of Rohingya fleeing their homeland by sea. The undercover system used to transit them through Thailand, usually with officials taking commission, appears to have collapsed for now.

The boatpeople who arrived yesterday said five other boats from near Sittwe had also put to sea around the time they departed.

However Chris Lewa, director of the activist group Arakan Project, said yesterday that the flow of boats from further north in Burma had halted a few days ago with uncertainty mounting about the escape route through Thailand.