Thailand becomes one of world's top hubs for human trafficking and kidnapping

Will the Uyghurs, the Rohingya and the Bangladeshis presently held in Thailand, find their way to Canada as refugees?  Yup, yup and double yup!!  Wait and see. The Uyghur Canadian Society  (yeh ... who knew, eh?) based in Montreal, has already been contacted. Strange that a Canadian Uyghur would be contacted for translating to the Thai police what the leader of the Chinese Uyghur had to say. Did the Uyghur Canadian Society sprinkle their telephone numbers in the Chinese Uyghur community ... just in case?   Hmmmmmm! 

Andrew RC Marshall at Reuters:
....Suspected Uighurs rescued  from Thai trafficking camp.
Police rescued about 200 suspected Muslim Uighurs from a human smuggling camp in southern Thailand, police sources said on Friday, in the latest crackdown on a burgeoning trafficking network in Southeast Asia.
The rescue of the Uighurs, believed to be from China's troubled far-western region of Xinjiang, brings the total number of people freed from human traffickers to well over 800 since Reuters exposed the whereabouts of the illegal camps in a December 5 investigation.

The raid is further evidence that human smugglers in southern Thailand - already a notorious trafficking hub for Rohingya boat people from Myanmar - are exploiting well-oiled networks to transport other nationalities in large numbers, despite an ongoing crackdown by Thai police.....
.....Two police raids in January, based on information provided in the Reuters investigation, freed a total of 636 people. At least 200 of them were Bangladeshis - an "unprecedented" number, said Thatchai....

....The Reuters investigation in December reported that Rohingya were held hostage in illegal camps hidden near the border with Malaysia until relatives paid ransoms to release them. Some were beaten and killed. ....

....Those rescued included at least 100 children, most of them toddlers or still breastfeeding, and a pregnant woman. ....

.....Police say the group claims they are Turkish, although they have no documents to prove that.
The group in Hat Yai shows strong similarities to Turkic-speaking Uighur asylum-seekers who have been detained in Bangkok, police sources say....
....Their silence is only broken by the mewling of children. They all have fair, Caucasian features and the women wear headscarves which leave only the eyes uncovered.

"These people will refuse to acknowledge Chinese citizenship to avoid being forcibly repatriated," said Kayum Masimov, president of the Montreal-based Uyghur Canadian Society. "They will simply refuse to talk. They fear for their safety."

Masimov spoke by telephone to the man identified by police as the group's leader and said he understood the Uighur language. The leader gestured toward men not to talk when Reuters approached them......

From SouthChinaMorningPost:
....200 'Turkish refugees'  rescued from Thai slave camp turn out to be Uygurs
200, half of them children, found at southern Thai rubber plantation claim to be from Turkey to avoid being forcibly returned to China.
Some 200 people rescued by police from a human trafficking camp in southern Thailand are suspected to be Uygur Muslims from Xinjiang , Thai police sources said yesterday.....