A 15-year-old boy playing hide-and-seek with his friends disappeared and was found in another country almost a week later.
The Bangladesh boy, named Fahim, was playing hide-and-seek with his friends when he decided that a shipping container was a great place to hide.
He didn’t know it, but the container was about to be shipped off to Malaysia. Fahim accidentally locked himself inside the container and fell asleep. He ended up on a ship.
The shipping container left the port city of Chittagong on Wednesday, January 11, and arrived in Port Klang, Malaysia, on Tuesday, January 17. For six days, the boy was stuck inside the container without food or water.
He was able to escape the container when the staff at Port Klang port heard knocking coming from inside the container. They were shocked to find the boy, emaciated and confused, stepping out of the container.
The staff didn’t know what to make of the situation, as the boy could not speak or understand the local language, and called the police.
Officers from the Marine Police Force, the District Health Department in Klang, and the Malaysian Immigration Department responded to the port.
Video footage of the fatigued and hungry boy emerging from the container was shared on social media.
Police at first suspected that Fahim was a victim of human trafficking, but they soon understood what had happened. The boy was taken to a hospital for treatment.
Malaysia’s Home Minister, Datuk Seri Nasution, released a statement about the incident, saying that authorities found the boy inside a container that arrived on a ship at the port.
It is not the first case of a teenager mistakenly climbing into a shipping container and finding themselves thousands of miles away. Sometimes the outcome is not so lucky.
In October 2022, Malaysian authorities discovered a 15-year-old’s decomposing body inside a shipping container that was transported from Chittagong to Penang Port, Malaysia.