How did 528 Rohingya escape from this Kedah detention camp? Here’s what we found out

So you might’ve heard about the Great Escape (shoutout Boys Like Girls) yesterday where 582 Rohingya refugees did a mass exodus from an immigration detention camp in Kedah yesterday. Most of them have been re-arrested since then in Ops Cantas Episode 420 thanks to the Kedah PDRM, but the question remains: how’d so many of them manage to break out of what was supposed to be a secure facility?

Yep, that’s straight up a missing section in the fence by the front gates of the camp. We know what you’re thinking: the Rohingya ripped the fence a new one so they could make a run for it! While that’s probably true to a certain extent, it’s likely they didn’t have to do too much, because…

That fence was in a state of disrepair since 2019 or even before that

After doing some cyber digging, we found an April 2019 Google Street View footage of the front gates of Kem Sri Impian, the temporary immigration depot where the refugees were held. Even back then, that section of the fence has seen better days to put it lightly. Sure, it’s made of barbed wire, but:

A) it looks flimsy as all hell; and

B) the gaps in that fence are bigger than our editor’s forehead

The escape now seems less of a “how’d they do it” and more of a “why didn’t they do it earlier” kind of thing… and you know what? It might’ve been prevented, or at least made slightly harder if the people in charge had made it a chain link fence, like the ones on the other side of the gates.

Oh yeah, in case you haven’t noticed, the depot actually used to be a National Service camp, until the government scrapped the program altogether in 2018. Anyway, with one mystery solved, you’re probably still wondering…

What were the guards doing?

Disclaimer: everything below this is speculation, so make of it what you will.

As enthusiasts of true crime YouTube videos and prison films, we at the CILISOS editorial team racked our brains to come up with explanations of what the guards are doing, and we’ve settled on two possibilities. The first one’s more stupid, and the second one’s less so.

Theory 1 – the escape reportedly happened around 4.20am. Maybe the guards were preparing for Sahur. It is Ramadan, after all

Theory 2 – the guards there were only tasked to call the police in an event of an escape

Before we end this article, we’ve got one last thing to say – it’s pretty ironic that a place called Kem Sri Impian is used to detain people.