Bangladesh police rescue 21 Myanmar

[tinkyi@xxxxxxx]

Bangladesh police rescue 21 Myanmar children
02:47 a.m. Oct 05, 1998 Eastern

DHAKA, Oct 5 (Reuters) - Bangladesh police have rescued 21 Myanmar children
and arrested eight people for trying to smuggle them abroad, police said on
Monday.

They said police found the children when they raided a hotel in Dhaka on
Sunday. The eight people arrested included four women who posed as the
children's mothers.

The children had been collected through agents of international human
traffickers and brought to Dhaka, one police officer said. They apparently
were destined for India.

Those arrested were being interrogated, the officer said without giving
details.

Police said some 15,000 women and children are smuggled out of Bangladesh
every year. Most of them end up in brothels or in virtual slavery as
domestic workers.

Thousands more lured away by traffickers on the promise of jobs remain
unaccounted for, said another police officer. He said most of the victims
came from poor families.

Nearly 250,000 Myanmar Moslems, known as Rohingyas, fled to southeastern
Bangladesh in early 1992 to escape alleged military persecution in their
homeland.

All but some 21,000 of them returned home under the supervision of the U.N.
High Commissioner for Refugees before the repatriation process suddenly
stopped in mid-1997.

``When the remaining refugees may go home is not yet known,'' a Bangladeshi
official in Teknaf, which borders Myanmar's western Moslem-majority Arakan
state, said on Monday.

Some of the Rohingyas have already mixed with local Moslems and some have
migrated abroad, mostly to the Middle East using forged Bangladeshi
passports, in search of jobs. Their children

``This happens every now and then, but we have no way to check it because of
striking physical and language similarities of the people on both sides of
the Bangladesh-Myanmar border,'' one official said.