The Myanmar police on Thursday arrested 11 Rohingya Muslims in Yangon after fleeing Arakan province.
In an statement to Anadolu agency, a police official said that 11 people had been arrested in a bus at a transport station.
He pointed out that human traffickers brought the detainees to the city, to go to the border with Thailand, and to Malaysia.
He pointed out that the authorities will take legal action because of their entry to Yangon “illegally”, he said.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said more than 70,000 Rohingya Muslims had fled Maungdaw since October.
The Myanmar army launched a military campaign in Arakan on 9 October after border posts were attacked.
The campaign included arrests and widespread security sweeps among the population that left at least 400 dead, according to Rohingya activists, in the country’s biggest wave of violence since 2012.
Arakan is one of Myanmar’s poorest regions and since 2012 has witnessed acts of violence between Buddhists and Muslims; hundreds of people have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced.
The Myanmar government considers the Rohingya “illegal immigrants from Bangladesh” under a law passed in 1982, while the United Nations classifies them as “the most persecuted religious minority in the world”.
