'They beat up our boatman badly. Then they loaded us onto two boats where we were all forced to become nude. After some hours, when the boats reached a town, we were made to walk nude in front of tourists and local men and women. We had never faced such embarrassment and humiliation in our life. When some tried to hide their genitals by bending forward, they were kicked by the policemen,' Akhtar said.

Akhtar was among a group of 412 Rohingya boatpeople expelled by Thai officers in mid-December 2008.

He also described how one of the boatpeople was thrown overboard with his hands tied as the group was loaded onto a powerless barge before their fateful journey, which ended with only 103 survivors rescued by the Indian coastguard. His account matches a description contained in official transcripts of the interrogations of survivors by Indian security officers.

'I spent about a fortnight in the Thai custody before 412 of us, with our hands tied on our back, were loaded onto an engineless boat. One among us was bleeding from his tightly tied hands. As he tried to loosen his hands, he was thrown out of the boat,' Akhtar said.

According to the Indian interrogation transcripts, provided to the South China Morning Post last year by sympathetic officers involved in the investigation, 'one juvenile aged around 14 to 15 years whose hands were tied was also thrown into the sea', during the process of loading the barge.

Another survivor of the Thai abandonment policy, Rafiqul Islam of Cox's Bazar's Ramkot village, said he was among a boatload of 93 people who were detained in Thai waters after setting out from Bangladesh in the second week of December 2008. He said that after detention on a Thai island, they were expelled in a boatload of 152 people. He said 19 died before they were rescued in the Indian Andamans in mid-January.

This account strongly suggests that Rafiqul was among the same group of 93 boatpeople featured in a photograph on the front page of the Post on January 15, days before the Post first reported on the full extent of the Thai policy and its deadly effects. The photo showed boatpeople being detained face down in the sand on the holiday island of Koh Baed (also known as Similan 8) as tourists frolicked nearby, on December 23. Rafiqul's description provides the first evidence that this group went on to become victims of the expulsion policy, their fate previously a mystery.

The rescue of 132 boatpeople by the Indian coastguard on January 12, 2008, also closely matches Rafiqul's story.

He described how, on an otherwise deserted island, about 40 men from his group were made to stand naked before a fire, their hands tied behind their backs and their legs apart. 'For 10 or 15 minutes at a stretch the men were forced to stand that way and such torture continued for more than a week, every night,' said Rafiqul, who along with two or three other younger boys, was assigned to collect firewood for the bonfires. He was 17 at the time.

'As the men standing stark naked before the fire cried out in pain, being unable to withstand the heat and trying to move away, they were kicked, beaten with wooden rods by the soldiers until they stood straight.'

He said survivors of this treatment were among those rescued from his party, but they had been too ashamed to make their allegations public.

Rafiqul added that when he was detained on a 'forested island' in Thailand for nine days, his entire group of 93 was forced to wade neck-deep into the sea every night - perhaps in an attempt to keep the detainees clean.

Whatever the reason, the effects were excruciating. 'I still remember how some men writhed in pain when their burn wounds came in contact with the salty sea water. The soldiers indicated they would be shot if they cried or tried to come out of water to escape the pain,' recalled Rafiqul, a non-Rohingya Bangladeshi.

Rafiqul, was among 174 boatpeople who were deported to Bangladesh by India in August 2009. He vowed never to go abroad again.

Another survivor from Rafiqul's boat, 18-year-old Jainal Abedin of Cox Bazar's Ramu village, said the detainees had their hands tied behind their back, day and night. When they were fed, they had to grovel face down in the sand, he said, and the Thai guards would routinely kick sand onto their plates. 'While our hands were tied on our back, we had to pick up the sand and dirt-mixed rice from the plate by using our lips and tongue like dogs. It was impossible to separate the dirt or sand from the rice in that handicapped position. They were ruthless,' he said.

'They tortured us not only to punish us for our offence of using Thailand to cross over to Malaysia, but also to deter others who might be planning to take the same Thai route in future,' Jainal said. 'They knew that we would tell people in Bangladesh how we were tortured by them in Thailand ... by a miracle, by Allah, I have survived.'

Fatal shores

Number of Rohingya who survived from a boatload of 412 cast adrift by Thai soldiers in mid-December 2008: 103