Cabinet minister Shahidan Kassim is toying with the idea making a tourist attraction out of the biggest of the human trafficking camps discovered near the Thai border.
Shahidan, a former Perlis menteri besar and current MP for Arau, was impressed by the camp which he visited today, according to Rakyat Post.
The camp near Lubuk Sirih is 100m from the border and the biggest of the 16 discovered so far.
Last week, police reported uncovering 139 graves of victims of human trafficking syndicates in 28 abandoned camps in hilly forested areas strung along the border near Wang Kelian.
“This camp is beautiful, three times bigger than the camp that was previously highlighted. The camp is almost the size of a football field, it even includes a surau, an imam’s house, vegetable farm and other facilities,” he was quoted as saying. “We also found beer cans from Thailand and playing cards, which suggests a huge community was living here,” he was reported to have told journalists at Wang Kelian.
He said the police had not yet processed the Lubuk Sirih camp, and he had asked that it be done quickly and its structure preserved, “to prove to Malaysians that (the camp) was not done by Malaysians”.
He said he intended to turn the camp into a tourist attraction “because of its strategic location and when a lot of tourists come here, there won’t be any more incidents like these. Let it be a place for the people to see how smuggling of people was done and where they were kept,” he was quoted as saying.
Police have recovered a total of 35 remains of victims from the camps so far. Villagers in the area have said that migrants had been seen in the area over a long period of time, sometimes attending prayers at the mosques. They appeared emaciated and weak.
