A video clip showed shocking scenes of a smuggler from Myanmar ruthlessly beating the passengers on a ship full of Rohingya refugees, reflecting the brutality that members of this Muslim minority are subjected to during their smuggling operation.
In these rare scenes filmed by a smuggler with a smartphone on a ship that set sail in February from Bangladesh towards Malaysia, rows of thin, seated migrants - including many children - appear crammed on the boat and the lower wooden decks.
A quarrel takes place during which a smuggler pushes an immigrant from this Muslim minority whose members flee repression in Myanmar (Burma), where the majority are Buddhist, and beats him with a rope.
Then he is armed with what appears to be a chain and beats a group of naked men trying to escape to another floor.
Hit because of a complaint
"They were hitting us, because we complained about the food given to us," said 16-year-old Muhammad Othman, who was on the ship.
"We just attacked the ship crew and hit us, because we were asking for more rice and water," he explains during an interview in the sprawling Cox's Bazar refugee camp on the coast of Bangladesh in the southeast.
A person named Inamul Hassan, 19, who was sitting next to him on the ship, used a phone that had fallen from a smuggler as he fled.
The video showed the two young men sheltering among refugees who were beaten several days before this 15-meter-long fishing vessel on the high seas returned to Bangladesh in mid-April with about 500 refugees on board.
These two witnesses say that these scenes represent only a short moment of the many acts of violence that the passengers were subjected to on board the ship.
What is the greatest hidden
During other unimaginable incidents, refugees died as a result of strikes inflicted on them by smugglers, according to Enamul Hassan.
The two young men assert that 46 people died during the trip, which cost each one of them two thousand dollars and was supposed to last a week.
An independent source could not verify these testimonies, but a third survivor confirmed them.
Miserable journey
Every year, hundreds of Rohingya leave refugee camps in Bangladesh near Myanmar, where the army launched a bloody crackdown three years ago, which the United Nations described as "genocide".
But during their miserable journey, often to Muslim-majority Malaysia where they hope to find work, a number of them die from starvation, disease, and mistreatment of smugglers.
A Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh (Reuters)
The crews of these ships often show no sympathy for the Rohingya and try to extort money from them, as many testimonies show.
More than 200 of them have died at sea this year, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Silence or death
In this boat, the passengers held out as "it was a matter of life or death," says Enamul Hassan.
He recounts that some people were begging smugglers to bring them to land, while they subsisted on a handful of rice and a small amount of water a day.
A boat carrying a number of the Rohingya Muslim minority fleeing Myanmar (Reuters)
"However, the smugglers used to say that no country would accept us, and they assured that they would kill us if we kept talking."
An uprising inside the boat
"And we realized that if the situation continued like this, we would die. We had to move as we were living in what looked like hell," Hassan added.
The passengers then attacked the smugglers, threatening to "kill them" if they did not land on land.
The crew threatened to set the boat on fire, according to what the young man recounts.
A few days later, a small boat appeared and all but two of the smugglers were traveling in.
"Two days later, they brought us back to Bangladesh and they fled," Hassan says.
According to UN statistics, more than 900,000 Rohingya refugees - most of them women and children - fled to Bangladesh after Myanmar forces launched a brutal crackdown on the Muslim minority in Rakhine Province (West) in August 2017.