Roundup: Bangladesh arrests 4 human-traffickers with hundreds of fake passports

Bangladesh police has arrested four human traffickers in possession of hundreds of passports, an official said on Tuesday.

"We've detained four human traffickers with some 850 passports from Dhaka's commercial district Motijheel," said the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) official who did not give his name.

Many of the passports seized were said to be counterfeit.

Acting on a tip-off, the CID personnel conducted a late night raid on a travel agency in Dhaka's Motijheel area and seized the passports some of which were found with visa stickers of different countries.

They also seized materials used for making forged documents.

Passport fraud is a common problem in Bangladesh.

In an effort to stop human-trafficking and other illegal activities, Bangladesh intensified a crackdown on traffickers since media reports regarding finding of mass graves of illegal migrants in Thailand aroused huge uproar in Bangladesh.

A number of human-traffickers have been killed in shootout with police in the southeastern coastlines of Bangladesh since last month while many were arrested.

Sources said there is a strong syndicate, comprising people from Bangladesh and neighboring Myanmar and Thailand, who have long been involved in trafficking people from the country.

Hundreds of illegal migrants every year either perish in the Bay of Bengal or fall into the hands of people-traffickers.

According to a report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) released on May 8, some 25,000 Rohingya and Bangladeshis boarded smugglers' boats on the Bay of Bengal between January and March of 2015, nearly doubling the number during the same time last year.

UNHCR staff spoke to hundreds of survivors of such journeys, and they estimated that 300 people died at sea in the first quarter of 2015 as a result of starvation, dehydration and abuse by boat crews. Endi