Rescued Rohingya describe high-seas terror

LHOKSEUMAWE, Indonesia: A group of Rohingya say they were beaten by traffickers and drank their own urine to stay alive on a perilous four- month journey at sea until their dramatic rescue near the Indonesian coast.

The bedraggled s u r v i vo r s — about 100 in all, mostly women and children — described a high- seas horror story that saw them reduced to throwing the dead overboard as their rickety craft drifted thousands of kilometers towards Malaysia.

Two survivors claimed that people smugglers paid to transport them had beaten the Rohingya who were later moved to a new boat and abandoned at sea.

They were rescued by fishermen in Indonesia on Wednesday and pulled to shore by locals the next day, thousands of kilometers south of Bangladesh.

“We suffered so much on that boat,” 50- year- old Rashid Ahmad told Agence France- Presse at an immigration detention center in Lhokseumawe City on Sumatra’s northern coast.

“They tortured us and cut us. One of us even died. There was food at first but when it was done they [the traffickers] took us onto another boat and then let us float away alone,” he added.

Another survivor, Habibullah, said: “They beat everyone badly. My ear was cut and I was beaten on the head.”

AFP could not independently verify the accounts of four members of the vulnerable Muslim minority group, who said they set off earlier this year near a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh, next to their native Myanmar.