Thai police find new trafficker camps

PADANG BESAR, May 5 (Agencies):  Thai police found two more camps - one recently abandoned and the other containing a buried skeleton - Tuesday believed to have held human trafficking victims in southern Thailand.
Thai officials say they have found two skeletons possibly linked to people smuggling, days after the discovery of 26 bodies in a mass grave.
Both skeletons were found in abandoned camps in Phang Nga province, the local governor said. One was tied to a tree.
Phang Nga is several hundred kilometres away from the site in Songkhla Province where 26 bodies were found.
Three Thais and a Myanmar national have been arrested in Thailand on suspicion of human trafficking.
"We will keep searching, because this means the traffickers are still on the run and taking people with them," said police Maj. Gen. Amphon Buarubporn, the commander of police for Songkla province.
The Thai authorities said Monday that they were investigating the complicity of local officials and police officers in a human trafficking network along the border with Malaysia where a mass grave has been unearthed.
The head of the national police, Gen. Somyot Poompanmoung, said that three local officials and one man from Myanmar had been arrested and that investigations would be opened into the border guard force, which has a base near the site of the mass grave discovered Friday.
Tuesday's discovery was part of a mission to find survivors - or bodies - that activists say are hidden in the mountains, five days after authorities dug up the 26 corpses at a nearby camp along the Thai-Malaysian border.
Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha gave orders Tuesday for provincial officials at all levels "to scan every inch of their areas" for more detention camps, trafficking victims or signs of collusion with officials, and warned that "those who seek or receive benefits (from human trafficking) will be investigated and punished," according to deputy government spokesman Maj. Gen. Sansern Kaewkamnerd.