Rescued during trafficking: Bangladeshi workers who set sail towards Malaysia were spotted at the Bay of Bengal by the Bangladesh Navy and were brought back to Chattogram. — New Age file photo
Owasim Uddin Bhuyan, (TCNews Country Rep)
Bangladeshi migrant workers have often got trafficked to some African countries, including Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Tanzania and Tunisia, said officials and victims on return.
They said that the transnational rackets of traffickers allured migrants from Bangladesh with fake jobs in the African countries and kept them trapped in their dens.
The traffickers have realized huge amount of ransom money from the families of victims left behind in Bangladesh, according to officials in Bangladesh.
Victim Mominur Islam had paid $ 3500 to some manpower brokers to go to Malaysia as a worker.
The brokers, who were actually members of a human trafficking gang, sent him to Benghazi of Libya where he was confined to a den and tortured on a regular basis for ransom.
‘Torture for ransom was an everyday affair, Mominur, who recently returned home, told the local media in Bangladesh about his captivity.
He said that the traffickers used to slap and kick him, beat him with an iron pipe and even put out burning cigarettes on his body.
On February 16, 2019, he along with eight other fortune seekers from Bangladesh was taken to the den where 30 other Bangladeshi youths were already confined for ransom, Mominur said.
He was lucky enough to get released and return home after police in Bangladesh had caught three members of the gang.
After they flew to Sharjah, UAE from Dhaka by air a person received them at the airport and took them to a hotel where they stayed for two days.
The person arranged their air tickets for Tunisia to where they travelled without any hassle.
In Tunisia, another Bengali speaking man received them and arranged their tickets for a Benghazi-bound flight.
Mominur said there were many rooms in the den guarded by Bangladeshi and Libyan people. ‘One of the rooms was used as torture cell,’ he said. ‘If anyone dared talk to other inmates, he would be tortured severely.’
Through video calls, they used to show the pictures of torture to the victims’ family members and even threaten to kill the hostages if ransom was not paid.
There are extensive reports on human trafficking gangs in Libya who kidnapped Bangladeshis seeking jobs abroad and held them hostage for ransom.
Bangladesh officials and rights campaigners said that migrant workers from Bangladesh on reaching the Sudan on job visas often get trafficked to Libya as well as European countries.
In 2017 from January to July 1,278 Bangladeshi workers went to the Sudan on job visas with clearance from the Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training.
Workers migrating to the Sudan end up as victims of trafficking, said SHISHUK executive director Shakiul Millat Morshed. He said he could not understand why Bangladeshis were being sent to a country where employment eludes its own population.
SHISHUK, an NGO, specializes in working with trafficking victims.
Not only Sudan, Bangladeshi workers were also sent to Somalia, an African country beset with hunger and poverty, with immigration clearance from BMET.
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When asked about job opportunities in Somalia, BMET director general Salim Reza said that he was not aware of sending workers to Somalia. ‘I have to look into the official documents to say how many workers have gone to which country,’ he said.
Officials preferring anonymity said that workers were sent to Somalia and other poor African countries on temporary job visas or fake job visas by recruiting agencies with motives to get them trafficked.
In 2012, at least 20 Bangladeshis who had languished in two Tanzanian prisons for the last 11 months finally returned home.
Brokers of unauthorised recruiting agencies lured them to Tanzania promising to get them lucrative jobs but abandoned them at the border of the East African country without travel documents.
Migration experts in Bangladesh said that low prosecution of the traffickers amid lack of enforcement of the counter-trafficking laws encouraged the unscrupulous middlemen to send the migrants abroad illegally and subject them to slavery.
According to statistics of Bangladesh Police’ Human Trafficking Cell, at least 4,414 trafficking cases were filed under the Prevention and Suppression of Human Trafficking Act since 2012.
”Over 8,000 people including men, women and children became victims of trafficking from January 2013 to November 2018.
At least 6,758 traffickers were arrested but only 29 of them were convicted, said the Police Headquarters’ Human Trafficking Cell.
U.S Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report 2019 said: ” Bangladesh has been put on Tier 2 Watch List for the 3rd consecutive year. ”This is just as the government failed to meet the minimum standards of trafficking elimination.
