BANGKOK, April 10: Fifty-four Myanmar migrants have suffocated to death in a cold storage container while being smuggled to Thailand to escape desperate conditions at home, Thai police said on Thursday.

The incident was the deadliest in a wave of recent tragedies as people flee economic collapse in military-ruled Myanmar and search for work in Thailand, where they often end up abused and exploited.

Police said that 121 people had been crammed inside an airtight frozen seafood container measuring six metres long and 2.2 metres wide.

Colonel Kraithong Chanthongbai, local police commander in southern Ranong province on Myanmar’s border where the bodies were found late on Wednesday, said the men and women were trying to get to Phuket island to work as day labourers.

But before they reached their final destination, 37 women and 17 men had suffocated to death in the stifling box with a broken ventilation system.

“The people said they tried to bang on the walls of the container to tell the driver they were dying, but he told them to shut up as police would hear them when they crossed through checkpoints inside Thailand,” Kraithong said.

One female survivor told Thai television: “No matter how many times we hit the container, the driver did not pay any attention.” When the truck driver realised some of the migrants had died, he parked by the side of the road, opened the door to the storage box and fled, Kraithong said. Police were still searching for him.

Ten of the migrants remain in hospital suffering from dehydration and lack of oxygen, a hospital worker said, while the dead have been buried in temporary graves in Phuket until their bodies are claimed by relatives.

The 57 migrants who escaped unharmed or were released from hospital have been arrested, Kraithong said.

The Myanmar nationals, who were likely to be deported, had agreed to pay a Thai smuggling ring 5,000 baht ($157) each for the journey.

About 540,000 migrant workers are registered to work in Thailand, most of them from Myanmar, labour ministry figures show, but as many as one million undocumented workers are believed to be in the kingdom.

“Their own country has been made into a pauper state by the military,” said David Mathieson, Myanmar consultant for New York-based Human Rights Watch.

The migrants flee low wages, high unemployment, poor education and harassment by the military in the country formally known as Burma, he said, often only to face abuse, persecution and exploitation in Thailand.

“A lot of people from Burma would much rather come and work in a factory in Thailand in desperate conditions with low pay rather than have to do forced labour and have things stolen from them by the Burmese army,” he said.

Seven migrants were found dead in January, apparently having drowned in a Thai lake while making the illegal crossing. In December, at least 22 died while making the sea journey when their boat collapsed.

They are not the only migrants in the world risking their lives searching for better conditions for their families.—AFP