Arakan News Agency
A boat carrying Rohingya Muslim refugees to Bangladesh capsized and at least 12 people, most of them children, drowned, police said on Monday, the latest victims of violence in Myanmar that has forced more than half a million people to flee.
The boat sank near Shah Porir Dwip, on the southern tip of Bangladesh, late on Sunday with up to 35 people on board, Bangladeshi police said.
Bangladeshi fishermen have been cramming their boats since late August with desperate Rohingya fleeing a Myanmar security crackdown that the United Nations has denounced as ethnic cleansing.
Bangladeshi police officer Mohammed Mainuddin told Reuters that 12 bodies – 10 children, one woman and a man – had been recovered.
A Reuters photographer earlier saw the bodies of four children, two women and a man washed up on a beach.
Authorities said 13 people had been rescued.
Some 519,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar since Aug. 25, when attacks by Rohingya militants on police and military posts in Rakhine State sparked a ferocious response from Myanmar’s security forces.
Myanmar rejects accusations of ethnic cleansing and has labeled the militants from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, who launched the initial attacks, as terrorists.
t even as refugees arrive, Bangladesh is insisting that they will all have to go home. Myanmar has responded by saying it will take back those who can be verified as genuine refugees.
Most Rohingya are stateless and many fear they will not be able to prove their right to return.
A Myanmar official held talks on a repatriation plan in Bangladesh last month and Bangladesh Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan is due to visit Myanmar for more this month.
Khan told reporters on Sunday he believed an agreement would be worked out.
Myanmar leader and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has faced scathing international criticism and dismay for not doing more to stop the violence, although she has no power over the security forces under a military-drafted constitution.
The United States and Britain have warned Myanmar the crisis is putting at risk the progress it has made since the military began to loosen its grip on power in 2011.
The European Union and the United States are considering targeted sanctions against Myanmar military leaders over the violence, officials familiar with the discussions say.
