Thai death truck driver surrenders to police Tue 15 Apr 2008, 10:42 GMT
BANGKOK (Reuters) - The driver of a container truck in which 54 illegal migrants suffocated to death on their way from army-ruled Myanmar to Thailand has surrendered to police after a seven-day manhunt, police said on Tuesday.Suchon Boonplong, who had been on the run since abandoning the vehicle, said he had been hired for 74,000 baht (1,194 pounds) to drive the truck from the border town of Ranong to the Thai resort island of Phuket, Police Colonel Kraithong Chanthongbai told Reuters.
"He confessed," Kraithong said. "He said he was a driver. He said he had initially got 37,000 baht, half of the pay, and he would have got the rest in Phuket."
Suchon is the first person to have confessed to a role in the tragedy, which has shone a rare spotlight on the human smuggling rings and the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers coming to Thailand from the impoverished former Burma.
The 54 who died were among 120 people crammed into the stifling hot container for several hours. Survivors said they pounded on the sides and screamed at the driver as the air grew thinner after the air conditioning system broke down.
"We contacted the driver using a mobile phone but he told us in Burmese to keep quiet and make no trouble," Tida Toy, 21, told the Bangkok Post newspaper. "He switched off the phone and drove on."
The owner of the 20-ft (6.1 metre) truck and the owner of a raft on which the migrants are thought to have crossed a river from Myanmar have also been arrested but have denied being part of a human smuggling network, Kraithong said.
"They said they just rented the truck and fish raft. But they're still being held in custody," he said. "We suspect more people are involved and we will be making more arrests."
About 2 million migrants from across the region are working in Thailand, most of them from Myanmar, where 46 years of army misrule and low-level guerrilla war have crippled a once-promising economy.
Only 500,000 are in the country legally, labour ministry figures suggest.
Under Thai law, registered migrants have the same rights as Thais, but in practice this is far from the case. They are routinely denied access to such basic rights as education, medical care and freedom of movement.
The vast majority are unregistered and work illegally in factories, restaurants, at petrol pumps and as domestic helpers, or crew on fishing trawlers for a fraction of the minimum wage.
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