Bangladesh police arrest human traffickers ‎

Police in Bangladesh arrested three human traffickers on Monday, following over 100 arrested in recent months as the South Asian Nations cracks down on trafficking humans, Reuters reported.  There has been a huge increase in refugees from Bangladesh and Myanmar drifting on boats to Malaysia and Indonesia in recent days after Thailand, usually the initial destination in the human trafficking network, announced its own crackdown on trafficking.  Three traffickers, accused of smuggling of thousands of people, were arrested in a raid in the southern Bangladeshi coastal town of Teknaf in the Cox's Bazar district, close to the border with Myanmar. 

An estimated 25,000 Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar and Bangladeshis boarded traffickers' boats in the first three months of this year, twice as many in the same period of 2014, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR has said.  The migrants brave perilous journeys to escape religious and ethnic persecution and poverty. The UNHCR estimated that 300 people died at sea in the first quarter of 2015 due to starvation, dehydration and abuse by boat crews. They were often trafficked through Thailand, a predominantly Buddhist country, and taken into the country's jungles, where traffickers demanded ransom to release them or smuggle them across the border to mainly Muslim Malaysia.  (Source:Reuters)