A drone attack on Rohingya fleeing Myanmar has killed dozens of people, including families with children, several witnesses said, describing survivors wading through piles of corpses to identify their dead loved ones and injured.
Four witnesses, activists and an international diplomat described Monday’s drone strike that targeted a family trying to cross the border into neighboring Bangladesh. A pregnant woman and her two-year-old daughter were among those killed in the attack, the deadliest attack on civilians in Rakhine state in recent weeks of fighting between junta forces and rebels.
Three of the witnesses told Reuters yesterday that the Arakan Army was responsible, a charge the group denied. The army and the Burmese army accused each other.
Reuters could not determine the number of people killed in the attack or determine whether they were independent. A video posted on social media shows piles of dead bodies on the muddy ground, with bags and suitcases strewn around.
Three survivors said more than 200 people had died, while one witness to the incident said he saw at least 70 bodies. Reuters confirmed that the videos were filmed outside the coastal city of Maungdaw, Myanmar.
Reuters could not independently confirm when the videos were made. A witness, Mohammed Eleyas, 35, said his pregnant wife and 2-year-old daughter were injured in the attack and later died.
He was standing on the beach with them when the plane began attacking the crowd, Eleyas told Reuters from a refugee camp in Bangladesh. He said: “I heard the sound of the explosion several times.
Eleyas said he lay down to protect himself and when he got up he found his wife and daughter seriously injured and many of his relatives dead. The second witness, Shamsuddin, 28, said he was alive with his wife and newborn son.
Speaking from a refugee camp in Bangladesh, he said that after the attack, many people had died and some were screaming in pain due to their injuries. A boat carrying Rohingya refugees, a predominantly Muslim group facing severe persecution in Burma, sank Monday in the Naf River that separates the two countries, killing dozens, according to witnesses. both according to Bangladeshi media.
Médecins Sans Frontières said in a statement that aid agencies are treating 39 people who have traveled from Myanmar to Bangladesh since Saturday for violence-related injuries, including bullet wounds and gunshot wounds. Patients described seeing people throwing bombs as they tried to find boats to cross the river, according to the statement.
A spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said the agency was aware of refugee deaths after two boats sank in the Bay of Bengal and had also heard of civilian deaths in Maungdaw, but could not confirm the number or circumstances. . Fighting in the area
The Rohingya have long been persecuted in the Buddhist-dominated country of Burma.
More than 730,000 of them fled the country in 2017 after a military crackdown that the UN said was carried out with genocidal intent. Myanmar has been in turmoil since the military seized power from a democratic government in 2021, and protests have turned into widespread violence.
The Rohingya have been fleeing Rakhine state for weeks as the Arakan Army, one of the many fighting forces, has made major advances in the north, where there is a large Muslim population. Reuters previously reported that the army set fire to the largest Rohingya village in May, making Maungdaw, surrounded by insurgents, the last Rohingya outpost in the dangerous IDP camps further south.
The group denied the allegation. Activists have condemned the attacks this week.
A Western diplomat said he had confirmed the message. These reports of hundreds of Rohingya killed in Bangladesh-Myanmar are, I’m sorry to say the truth, said Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations and former special envoy to Myanmar, published in X Wednesday.
The Burmese military blamed the Arakan Army in a message posted on its Telegram channel. The soldiers denied their responsibility.
According to our investigation, the family members of the terrorists tried to go to Bangladesh from Maungdaw and the army threw the bomb because they left without permission, the spokesman of the Arakan army told Reuters , Khine Thu Kha, refers to Muslims joining the Rohingya fighting forces. Arakan Army. Efforts to save
Reuters can confirm the location of the videos seen on social media based on the location and shape of the mountains and the coast, which corresponds to archival and satellite images of the area.
The property that appears in one of the videos also matches the photos of the place. The location of these videos falls within the area described by Shamsuddin.
Eleyas described how his wife and daughter died after the attack and his desperate efforts to find a boat to take them to Bangladesh. Before his wife died, “we apologized to each other for every bad thing we did in our lives,” he said.
Around midnight, he said, he finally found a small boat and managed to get across.
