121 people had been crammed inside an airtight seafood container

The police said 121 people had been crammed inside an airtight seafood container late Wednesday night that measured just 20 feet long and 7 feet wide. Survivors said they had shouted and banged on the sides of the sweltering container as they began to collapse from lack of air. Fifty four migrant workers from Myanmar suffocated in the back of a sealed truck in southern Thailand as they were being smuggled into the country to work as illegal laborers, the Thai police said Thursday. Col. Kraithong Chanthongbai, the local police commander in Ranong Province, on Myanmar’s border, said that the dead included 37 women and 17 men and that they were heading for the resort island of Phuket to work as day laborers. Twenty-one of the survivors were hospitalized and the others were held for questioning, he said. All but two were later discharged from the hospital. The deaths illustrated the dangers migrant workers face as they are smuggled by the millions across borders into countries as far apart in the world as the United States, Britain and Thailand.
In a similar incident in 2003 in Texas, 19 Latin American migrants died from overheating and suffocation inside a trailer truck. In 2001 in Britain, 58 illegal Chinese migrants died when they were crammed into a sweltering tomato truck.
Last December, the bodies of 22 migrants from Myanmar were found floating in the ocean near the west coast of Thailand. Earlier last year, 11 workers from Myanmar died when a pickup truck crammed with 40 passengers crashed near the northern Thai border. In the latest case, the police said they were searching for the truck driver as well as for members of the smuggling ring they believed arranged the trip. They said they had detained the owner of the truck, who said he was unaware that it was being used to transport migrants.
One of the survivors, Saw Win, 30, told The Associated Press: “I thought everyone was going to die. I thought I was going to die. If the truck had driven for 30 minutes more, I would have died for sure.” He said that about 30 minutes into the trip, the workers began to bang on the side of the container, screaming to the driver for help. The driver briefly turned on the air conditioning but it went off again. The workers continued pounding and shouting for another hour until the driver stopped the truck, unlocked the container and ran off, Win said. Officials estimate that about one million workers from Myanmar are in Thailand illegally, usually in low-paying jobs as laborers or domestic workers or on fishing boats.
As in other countries, they face abuse and exploitation with few legal protections.
The London-based human rights group Amnesty International said in a report in 2005 that workers from Myanmar “are routinely paid well below the Thai minimum wage, work long hours in unhealthy conditions and are at risk of arbitrary arrest and deportation.” They are typically brought into the country by large smuggling syndicates in difficult and often dangerous conditions. Survivors told the police on Thursday that they had each paid 10,000 baht ($314) to be smuggled into Thailand.
They said they had come by fishing boat from Myanmar’s Victoria Point to Ranong Province, about 286 miles south of Bangkok, before being loaded into the truck.
Colonel Kraithong said it was not unusual for his station near the border of Myanmar to catch illegal migrants, but he said they usually came in groups of five or six, hidden in secret compartments under piles of vegetables or boxes or loads of wood.