Refugees’ stories: Boat carrying Rohingya children, women, men capsized [Video]

MEULABOH, Indonesia –

Huddled on board the boat, the 12-year-old girl quaked with fear.

The captain and crew who she says had tortured her and three other women and girls were not finished. And the punishment for disobedience, the men warned, would be death.

It was the third night that the girl and around 140 other ethnic Rohingya refugees had been trapped on the fishing boat off Indonesia’s coast. They had fled Bangladesh and their homeland of Myanmar in a bid to escape violence and terror, only to face the same at sea.

The 12-year-old — identified in this story only by the initial N, because she is a sexual assault survivor — tried to hide. She had already survived a night in the captain’s bedroom, where she says he and several crew members had beaten and sexually abused her.

Like most of the passengers, she had survived attacks by Myanmar’s military that …