Warning: Graphic Images
Phuketwan publishes these disturbing images because the topic is of national and international public interest
PHUKET: A forensic team from Bangkok joined soldiers, rescue teams and police today in continuing to exhume bodies at a hillside camp in southern Thailand.
Although survivors from Burma and Bangladesh have been telling journalists for years about horrific conditions in the Thai trafficking camps, the number of bodies found in Songkhla yesterday appears to have finally persuaded doubting officials.
As the soil was removed from above the bodies, the era of Thailand overlooking the horrors of trafficking was also being exposed.
Thailand has for years been a country where people seeking sanctuary or a new life have been trafficked but the horrors of the process have largely been ignored.
Villagers and officials along the Andaman coast and in southern Thailand have grown wealthy on the proceeds of the trade in humans.
Today all that was changing as the big names in the international media - CNN, BBC and Aljazeera - reported from the hillside of shame in Songkhla province.
It will take some time for autopsies to confirm the manner of death of the bodies being exhumed today, but enough is already known about the trafficking trade by those who have observed it closely to speculate with accuracy.
The grisly findings lay to rest forever the justification that Thailand has been doing as much as it can to prevent trafficking, to save the victims and to capture the ringleaders.
The skeletal state of some of the remains and the intact nature of other bodies demonstrates that the trafficking trade was continuing until a couple of days ago, when the traffickers fled, leaving their obscene hillside graveyard for the world to contemplate.
Dear Ed
A picture paints a thousand words so they say. Well done for publishing the disturbing images.
This story provides further confirmation of what Phuketwan and others have been telling the world for years now. Lifting the dirt on a grubby, disgusting trade.
Posted by Ian Yarwood on May 2, 2015 16:17