IT WAS meant to be a short trip across the border for a job and better life in Thailand.
Instead, Saw Win feels lucky to be alive after escaping the hot, cramped container lorry where 54 other Burmese migrant workers suffocated on Wednesday night.
"If I had known I would have ended up like this, I would not have come back," said the
30-year-old who survived by peeling a rubber seal off a container door to let air inside after the lorry's refrigeration system broke down.
"If I had not peeled off the rubber seal, more people would have died," he said from a police cell, where 63 survivors waited to appear in court today for illegal entry.
Mr Win, who was returning to a construction job on the southern resort island of Phuket after seeing his family in Burma, said the 120 migrants stood "shoulder to shoulder" in the 6ft by 20ft freezer container for several hours.
After the ten-wheeled lorry left the Thai border town of Ranong at 8pm on Wednesday, the workers used mobile phones to talk to the driver, asking him to adjust the air conditioning.
Forty-five minutes later, the refrigeration unit broke down. Then they lost the mobile phone signal as the truck drove through narrow hills and into valleys.
"If there had been air-con, people would not have died," he said of the victims, who included a nine-year-old girl.
Police said 37 of the dead were women and 17 were men.
"From 8:45 pm, people started passing out. All of us who were still conscious banged on the driver's cabin very hard to get him to stop, but he didn't," said Mr Win, who has a 15-month-old daughter in Burma.
When the driver stopped the lorry at about 10pm, the survivors managed to kick open the back door and run for help.
"We saw a brightly-lit house and ran toward it, shouting "help, help", Mr Win said.
Police were searching for the lorry's driver and members of the smuggling gang they believed arranged the trip.
More than a million people from neighbouring army-ruled Burma are estimated to work in Thailand, most of them illegally in factories, restaurants, at petrol pumps and as domestic helpers or crew on fishing trawlers. They are usually hidden under goods such as vegetables or fruit in small or big overloaded lorries, leading to tragic road accidents.
Large numbers of illegal migrants also come from Thailand's other poor neighbours, Cambodia and Laos.
The illegal workers lack legal protection and are often ruthlessly exploited.
Mr Win said he paid a broker 5,000 baht (£80) to take him from the Burmese border town of Kawthaung to Phuket, a 330- mile journey.
Mr Win said he had crossed at the Thai border town of Ranong using a pass which allows locals from both countries to visit for one week, although they must stay within a 12-mile radius.
Mr Win said his life as a welder at construction sites in Phuket was better than many other migrant workers.
He earned at least 250 baht a day, twice what he could make in Burma's crumbling economy after 46 years of military rule, and saved 50,000 baht from working in Phuket.
"With a wife and a child, we would not have enough to eat if I worked at home," said Mr Win, who now faces deportation with the rest of the lorry survivors.
The incident was reminiscent of the deaths in 2001 of 58 illegal Chinese migrants in a sweltering tomato lorry in Britain, which exposed the underworld of people-smuggling gangs.
The full article contains 622 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
