Dozens guilty in human-trafficking case

Victims found buried in mass grave in Thailand.

A court in Thailand convicted dozens Wednesday of organizing a human-trafficking ring that enslaved hundreds of people. Many victims were found buried in a mass grave near a secret jungle camp in which they had been imprisoned, tortured and held for ransom.

The defendants included a high-ranking officer, Lt. Gen. Manas Kongpan, and Pajjuban Aungkachotephan, a businessman and former politician, as well as police officers and smugglers from Bangladesh, Myanmar and Thailand.

The general was convicted of trafficking and of committing an organized transnational crime, and he was sentenced to 27 years in prison; Pajjuban received a 75-year sentence.

The defendants were arrested in 2015 after 36 bodies were found in shallow graves near the border with Malaysia.

The discovery led to efforts to dismantle a multimillion-dollar smuggling enterprise, and the traffickers soon abandoned their human chattel in jungle camps or in crowded vessels adrift in the Andaman Sea.

Investigators said the victims were from Bangladesh or Myanmar — many of them Rohingya, a persecuted Muslim minority — and had paid smugglers to help them find work in Thailand. Instead, they became slaves in Thailand’s lucrative fishing fleet, authorities said.

Judges at the Criminal Court in Bangkok held a lengthy session Wednesday to announce the verdicts, and many relatives of the defendants were crying as the verdicts were read aloud.

In doing so, the judges quoted the testimony of witnesses who had described harrowing transnational journeys of deprivation.

Victims said they had been smuggled from Bangladesh and Myanmar in cramped boats with little food and water.

After arriving in Thailand, they were packed into trucks and marched to camps high in the forested mountains of Songkla province.

There, they were imprisoned and made to call their families and beg for ransoms of around $3,000. Some said they had been raped.

When discovering the jungle camp in 2015, Thai police described finding bamboo cages, watchtowers and a “torture room.”