More then 50 illegal migrants die in Thai truck

Villagers in Ranong, Thailand, who discovered a truck abandoned by its driver in sweltering heat found evidence of the brutal cost of human trafficking: 121 illegal immigrants from Myanmar jammed inside, 54 of them dead.

Police were searching Thursday for the driver and hints as to who set up the ill-fated journey by the job seekers headed to the booming Thai resort island of Phuket.

Thailand is a haven for millions of migrants from Cambodia, Laos and especially Myanmar who take menial and dangerous jobs shunned by Thais.

In 2005, Thailand temporarily registered some 1.3 million migrants from the three countries, but a report by the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration stated hundreds of thousands more weren’t registered, including tens of thousands illegally brought into the country by unscrupulous traffickers.

Survivors in the truck told police that the group traveled the day before by fishing boat to Ranong, about 290 miles south of Bangkok.

They were jammed into a truck normally used to carry seafood, locked inside and forced to ride standing up in a sweltering container measuring 7 feet wide by 7 feet high and 20 feet long.

The migrants were on the road for about two hours, survivors said, when passengers started fainting as outside temperatures in the area reached 93 degrees.

The migrants began pounding the door and screaming until the driver stopped, unlocked the door and ran away when he saw the state of the victims, survivor Saw Win said.

“I thought everyone was going to die,” he said. “If the truck had driven for 30 minutes more, I would have died for sure.”