'Notorious' human traffickers killed by Bangladeshi police

Bangladeshi police shot dead three smugglers accused of trafficking thousands of people, officials confirmed Friday.

Police said the three "notorious" traffickers died in a firefight during an anti-trafficking raid in the southern coastal town of Teknaf in the Cox's Bazar district, close to the border with Myanmar.

The traffickers were suspected of smuggling thousands of Bangladeshi and Rohingya Muslims across the sea to Thailand and Malaysia. 

The raid followed the discovery this month of migrant graves and a network of secret jungle camps run by human traffickers in Thailand's deep south. Locals there reacted with anger after Thai authorities exhumed more than 30 bodies, all believed to be from Bangladesh and Myanmar, from the two graves this month.

"The three are the most notorious human traffickers to have been operating along the Bangladesh-Myanmar border for years," senior regional police officer Jashim Uddin told Agence France-Presse.

He added that one of them, 55-year-old Dholu Hossain, had been responsible for smuggling more than 1,000 Bangladeshis, "many of whom are now believed to have died in the sea or of starvation."

"He used to send 50 people, mostly poor locals, per shipment in locally made wooden fishing trawlers, taking $255 from each person," he told AFP, adding that Dholu had been arrested several times but released on bail. 

The crackdown on human trafficking networks in Thailand is putting migrants fleeing Myanmar and Bangladesh at more risk as smugglers hold their captives for longer at sea and hide deeper in the jungle, activists and officials said. The traffickers are taking greater risks to avoid being caught and the results are conditions of increasing desperation. 

"Before, the ships would wait for people in Myanmar, and once they were full, would rush over and in four or five days be in Thai waters. But not anymore," Police Colonel Anuchon Chamat, deputy commander of police in the southern province of Nakhon SiThammarat, told Reuters.

Spooked traffickers now separate migrants into smaller groups and keep them on the move between camps, said Chris Lewa of the Arakan Project, which plots migration across the Bay of Bengal.

Thailand's junta chief Friday called for Malaysia and Myanmar's help in stamping out the region's thriving human trafficking trade as the United Nations warned migrant crossings in the Bay of Bengal have dramatically spiked. 

Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha said he is seeking a three-way meeting with the neighboring countries before the end of May following the discovery of remains from dozens of migrants in southern Thailand.

Thousands of young men have gone missing from coastal villages in southern Bangladesh in recent years. 

Al Jazeera and wire services