Sandwip, Chattogram, Bangladesh
In the dead of Friday night, March 13, 2026, thirty-seven Rohingya men, women, and children were found exhausted and stranded along the embankment area of Santoshpur Union in Sandwip upazila, Chattogram. A joint operation by the Bangladesh Navy and local police detained them around 11:30 PM near the Botgachtala Hilsha Ghat, after local residents spotted the group and alerted law enforcement.
Among those detained were 8 men, 6 women, and 23 children and adolescents. They had spent three days and three nights drifting across open water, with no fuel, no safety, and no certainty they would survive.
Their journey had begun the previous Tuesday, when the group slipped away from the Bhashan Char refugee shelter and hid inside a mangrove forest near the coastline. They had paid five thousand taka each to a human trafficking network, a broker syndicate that promised to transport them to the Sitakunda coast in Chattogram. From there, most of them planned to reach Kutupalong refugee camp in Teknaf, Cox’s Bazar, where their families and relatives have been living for years.
The escape did not go as promised. On Wednesday night, they were loaded onto a small boat heading toward Sitakunda. Before they could reach the shore, the boat capsized near the coast. They were transferred to a second vessel, only for that vessel to run completely out of fuel somewhere in the open Bay of Bengal. For three days, the boat drifted without direction. No one came. Eventually, the vessel was guided near Sandwip and the passengers were let off without assistance.
But before that, the traffickers turned on them. According to multiple accounts from the detained group, members of the broker syndicate held them at gunpoint and by knifepoint, stripping them of cash, gold jewelry, and smartphones. The boat’s operator reportedly carried a firearm. Four others among the syndicate were armed with knives.
Johora Begum, a 40-year-old woman among those detained, described the moment a syndicate member pulled the gold earrings, weighing half a tola, directly from her ears. She said it calmly, the way someone speaks when they have already accepted the worst.
Most in the group said they had only one destination in mind: to be reunited with their families in Teknaf. One woman among them had a different destination altogether. Her husband’s family lives in Rangpur, in northern Bangladesh. She had been separated from them and was trying to find her way back.
Sandwip Police Station Officer-in-Charge Zahed Noor confirmed that the group was given temporary shelter at the Santoshpur Union Parishad building overnight. He said administrative decisions are being made to return them to the Bhashan Char shelter.
Thirty-seven people. Twenty-three of them children. Three days on an open sea. This was not an act of recklessness. It was an act of desperation born from years of displacement, separation, and longing. The brokers who exploited them, armed and organized, operated with full knowledge of that desperation and turned it into profit.
