KANGAR: A total of 22 bodies recovered from abandoned migrant camps close to the Perlis-Thai border, underwent post-mortem today.
Perlis police chief SAC Shafie Ismail said of the 22 bodies, 14 were between the ages of 20 and 40; 12 between the ages of 40 and 60, two aged 17 to 25; and one which is believed to be over 60-year-old.
"Of the 22 bodies, 21 are male, but we could not determine the gender of one more body,"he said.
Shafie said the medical forensics team were in the midst of examining 84 other remains at the Sultanah Bahiyah Hospital in Alor Star, Kedah.
In a span of three weeks, police officers retrieved a total of 106 bodies from 139 graves found on the higher contours hills on the Nakawan range.
Most of the bodies brought down were skeletal remains and highly-decomposed remains.
Police will use the findings by the pathologists to ascertain if there are criminal reasons to their deaths.
On May 11, police found 28 settlements and 139 burial plots deep in the jungles of Wang Kelian.
The discovery was made after two weeks of thorough combing through the 50km Malaysia-Thai border in Perlis.
Police learnt about the existence of the camps where traffickers detained large groups of migrants but could not pinpoint the exact location until the discovery of camps in Thailand early last month.