A video clip obtained by AFP shows a Myanmarese smuggler ruthlessly beating the passengers on a ship full of Rohingya refugees, reflecting the brutality members of this Muslim minority are subjected during their smuggling process.

In these rare scenes filmed by a smuggler with a smartphone on a ship that set sail in February from Bangladesh to Malaysia, rows of thin, seated immigrants, among them many children, are seen crammed into the boat and the lower wooden decks.

A quarrel takes place during which a smuggler pushes an immigrant from this Muslim minority whose members flee oppression in Myanmar, where the majority are Buddhist, and hits him with a rope.

Then he is armed with what appears to be a chain and beats a group of topless men trying to escape to another floor.

"They started beating us because we complained about the food given to us," said 16-year-old Muhammad Othman, who was on the ship.

"The ship crew hit us just because we were asking for more rice and water," he explains during an interview at the sprawling Cox's Bazar refugee camp on the coast of southeast Bangladesh.

A person named Inamul Hassan, 19, who was sitting next to him on the ship, used a phone that had fallen from a smuggler as he fled.

The video showed the two young men sheltering among refugees who were beaten several days before the return of this 15-meter-long fishing vessel on the high seas to Bangladesh in mid-April with about 500 refugees on board.

These two witnesses say that these scenes represent only a short moment of the many acts of violence that the passengers were subjected to on board the ship.

The two young men assert that 46 people died during the trip, which cost each one of them $2000 and was supposed to last a week.

AFP was unable to independently verify these testimonies, but a third survivor confirmed them.

- 'Hell' -

Every year, hundreds of Rohingya leave the refugee camps in Bangladesh, near Myanmar, where the army launched a bloody crackdown three years ago, which the United Nations described as "genocide."

But during their often miserable journey to predominantly Muslim Malaysia where they hope to find work, a number of them die from starvation, disease, and mistreatment of smugglers.

The crews of these Myanmarese ships often show no sympathy for the Rohingya and try to extort money from them, as many testimonies show.

More than 200 of them have died at sea in 2020, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In this boat, the passengers held out, as Enamul Hassan asserts, "it was a matter of life or death."

He recounts that some were begging smugglers to take them to land while they subsisted on a handful of rice and a small amount of water a day.

"However, the smugglers used to say that no country would accept us, and they assured that they would kill us if we kept talking," he said.

"And we realized that if the situation continued like this, we would die. We had to move as we were living in what looked like hell," he added.

The passengers then attacked the smugglers, threatening to "kill them" if they did not land on land. The crew threatened to set the boat on fire, according to what the young man recounts.

A few days later, a small boat appeared and all but two of the smugglers boarded. "Two days later, he brought us back to Bangladesh and they fled after that," Hassan says.