A boat carrying Rohingya refugees has sunk near the Malaysia-Thailand border, leaving at least seven people dead and hundreds missing, Malaysian authorities announced on Monday (10 November 2025).
The ship, carrying about 300 migrants from Burma’s Rakhine state, sank on November 6 after leaving Burma three days earlier, according to Romli Mustafa, head of the local maritime agency, Malaysian government agency Bernama news agency reported.
So far, rescue teams have managed to save 13 people and recover seven bodies, and search operations continue across more than 580 square kilometers off the coast of Langkawi, a Malaysian archipelago located in the Andaman Sea, very close to the border with Thailand.
Authorities believe the passengers split into three small boats as they approached the Malaysian coast to avoid detection. The whereabouts of the other two ships are unknown.
Romli said transnational human trafficking networks are increasingly exploiting migrants, who are victims of human trafficking through dangerous sea routes.
Most of the passengers on these ships were Rohingya, a persecuted stateless Muslim minority in Myanmar who fled the country in their hundreds of thousands after a military crackdown in 2017. More than 1.3 million people are currently living in precarious conditions in refugee camps in Bangladesh.
Driven by violence in their countries of origin and lack of prospects in camps, thousands of Rohingya take to the seas by boat every year to Southeast Asia, primarily Malaysia and Indonesia.
According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), more than 5,100 Rohingya people crossed the sea from Burma and Bangladesh between January and early November this year, and about 600 of them were killed or missing.
gs (efe, Reuters)
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