Bangladesh police save children fro

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Bangladesh police save children from traffickers
03:38 a.m. Oct 06, 1998 Eastern

DHAKA, Oct 6 (Reuters) - Bangladesh police have rescued 39 children from
traffickers in raids this week, police said on Tuesday.

They said 18 children were saved during one raid in a Dhaka hotel on Monday.
A similar raid on Sunday rescued another 21 children.

Police said Sunday's group included boys and girls from Myanmar, but the
later group included both Myanmar and Bangladeshi children.

Police arrested 14 suspected traffickers, including four women, during the
raids. They were being interrogated, one police officer said.

The rescued children, aged between 6 and 12 years old, were collected from
the districts of Chittagong, Cox's Bazar and Noakhali in southeastern
Bangladesh. They were apparently destined for India and the Middle East,
where most would end up in brothels or as jockeys in camel races, police
said.

Police said some 15,000 women and children are smuggled out of Bangladesh
every year. Thousands more lured away by traffickers with promises of jobs
remain unaccounted for, they said.

The Centre for Women and Children Studies, a non-government organisation,
said in a newspaper report on Tuesday it had recorded 2,600 children who had
gone missing over the past seven years. Only 228 had been rescued, the
centre said.

Nearly 250,000 Myanmar Moslems, known as Rohingyas, fled to southeastern
Bangladesh in early 1992 to escape alleged military persecution in their
homeland.

All but some 21,000 of them returned home under the supervision of the U.N.
High Commissioner for Refugees before the repatriation process suddenly
stopped in mid-1997.