By CS Thana
BANGKOK
Thai officials have seized assets worth over 34 million baht ($1.01 million) from suspected human traffickers, a report said Saturday.
The Anti Money Laundering Office (AMLO) said that the new seizures brought the total amount of assets seized since Thailand began to clamp down on smuggling camps on its border to over $100 million.
The Bangkok Post reported AMLO's chief as saying that the money was the fourth round of asset seizures in the people smuggling crackdown, and comprised 68 items, including a 4 million baht bank account owned by Lt. Gen. Manas Kongpaen.
Kongpaen is currently in custody on charges that he played a major role in the human trafficking trade.
Police Col. Sihanart Prayoonrat said that it has been confirmed that the money was transferred to the general by a broker who trafficked Rohingya Muslims.
The broker earned his living through people smuggling, so it became clear that Kongpaen was somehow connected with the human trafficking gang, Prayoonrat said.
He added that his office had also discovered that about 30 million baht had recently been transferred into another bank account belonging to Kongpaen, but it was not clear if this money also came from human trafficking.
"If police later find clear evidence to prove the money really came from the human trafficking business, it will be seized as well. But at this point it is still too soon to conclude how it was earned," the Post reported Prayoonrat as saying.
On Thursday, Army Chief Udomdej Sitabutr told a press conference that Kongpaen has been suspended without pay by the army while officials investigate his alleged roll in the trafficking of migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar.
The general turned himself in last week after courts approved a warrant for his arrest.
Kongpaen was a senior adviser to the Royal Thai Army, and himself once oversaw human trafficking investigations in Thailand's south.
Thai officials have been implicated by rights groups as colluding with human smugglers who have been praying on the migrants - many of whom are Muslim Rohingya fleeing persecution described by some human rights groups as "state sponsored" in Myanmar.
Tens of thousands of Rohingya have left Myanmar attempting to reach Muslim majority Malaysia and Indonesia on crammed boats.
The journey has exposed them to human traffickers who have held them at temporary camps within Thailand to demand ransoms from their families back home.
If no ransom is paid, the refugees are often beaten and/or killed.
It was the discovery of one such camp May 1 that prompted the Thai junta to clamp down on trafficking networks and routes, sparking an international crisis as thousands of refugees became stranded in trafficking boats, unable to land in the country.
Many of the estimated 7,000 Rohingya Muslims and Bangladeshis on the boats have been taken in - albeit temporarily - by Indonesia and Malaysia, but Thailand has not offered to house the migrants, its navy instead turning the vessels back to sea after providing them with food and water.
Since the crackdown began on the networks, over 47 Thai village officials and police officers have been charged in aiding the network.
So far, the junta has obtained 71 arrest warrants for human trafficking suspects from the courts.
Kongpaen is the highest-ranking person arrested so far.
Others arrested under human trafficking charges are police officers, local officials and a former president of Satun provincial administration organization, Pajjuban Angchotiphan, considered "a human-trafficking kingpin."
Satun is on Thailand’s forested border with Malaysia, where many of the smugglers' detention camps have been found.
Kongpaen has denied all charges, and asked the public to wait for "the facts" before they judge him.
