KULIM: Police raided a house in Taman Rambai here and uncovered a syndicate that brings in foreigners illegally on the pretext of getting them jobs.
Instead, they were tortured and locked up unless they pay the demanded fees.
The raiding party found 18 frail foreigners, 11 of them from Bangladesh and the rest from Myanmar, at the double-storey house during the operation at 1.15am yesterday.
One of the foreigners was only 12 years old and another had a badly-scalded back caused by hot water. Some of the migrants had been chained by the legs.
Kulim police chief Supt Abdullah Arshad said they were all frail. “They alleged that they were often beaten or roughed up by the syndicate members who had brought them into the country,” he added.
During the raid, two men believed to be syndicate members fled through the roof of the house that had been rented by a Myanmar man since November last year, he said.
Supt Abdullah said the raid also provided the police with answers to the discovery of two bodies of foreign nationals at a Chinese cemetery next to Taman Kijang, Lunas, and one body wrapped in black plastic sheet in Batu Putih, Sungai Karangan, last December.
“These are believed to be linked to the syndicate, besides the discovery of the body of a foreigner in Jalan Labu Besar here early this year,” he added.
Supt Abdullah said police found out from the migrants that they had paid 200,000 taka (about RM10,000) to the syndicate to enter and work in the country.
They would arrive at the Malaysian border with Thailand and would be brought in by the syndicate to the house on the pretext of providing them temporary shelter until they were sent elsewhere to work, he said.
However, they would be asked to pay the syndicate another 200,000 taka or find themselves locked up and tortured, he added.
“If any of them died, the body will be dumped elsewhere,” he said. — Bernama
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