More than 100 migrant workers from Myanmar were inside truck freezer

BANGKOK, Thailand (CNN) -- The rising temperature first signaled trouble to Muang Win as he stood crammed into a truck container with 120 other Burmese migrants, rumbling toward the dream of a better life.

He called the driver on his mobile phone, he told CNN, but the driver didn't answer. People around him collapsed as it got hotter and hotter. Win and others banged on the walls.

"It took such a long while 'till he stopped the truck," he said. "When the driver pulled over the truck and came down to open the container, I almost fainted out."

Police say 54 people, including an 8-year-old girl, died Wednesday evening after they were stuffed into that sweltering container -- a deadly reminder of the perils facing people who pay human smugglers and often endure hardship in hopes of economic opportunity.

It happened in Ranong Province, in southern Thailand.

Each of the 121 people in the truck container had paid about $160 for a driver to take them into Thailand, which has long depended on cheap labor from neighboring countries, such as Burma, Cambodia and Laos.

The Thai government lets in only a small number of immigrants from those countries, and that has led to a rise in smuggling cases. Up to 2 million immigrants from Myanmar have fled to Thailand to escape chronic poverty and political conflict at home. Many smuggled migrants who do make it to Thailand wind up being abused by their employers.

None of the 121 migrants had identity documents, police said, so authorities tried to identify them by relying on the word of survivors. Seventeen bodies had not yet been identified by Friday, when accounts from survivors like Win began to surface.
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Win spoke from a cell from a police station in Suksumran, where about 65 other survivors have been taken. The police chief there said he expects to see more would-be migrants.

"We still need more labor here," he said. "There are many construction projects going on."