- A heavily pregnant woman and her daughter were among the victims.
- The deadliest known attack on Rakhine civilians in weeks.
- The Arakan Army denies allegations of having launched the attack.
BANGKOK: A drone strike on Rohingya fleeing Myanmar has killed dozens of people, including families with children, several witnesses said, describing survivors wandering through piles of bodies to identify dead and wounded relatives.
Four witnesses, activists and a diplomat described Monday's drone strikes that wiped out families hoping to cross the border into neighbouring Bangladesh.
A heavily pregnant woman and her two-year-old daughter were among the victims of the attack, the deadliest known attack on civilians in Rakhine state during recent weeks of fighting between junta troops and rebels.
Three of the witnesses said Reuters On Friday, the Arakan Army was said to be responsible, accusations the group denied. The militia and Myanmar's military blamed each other. Reuters It was not possible to verify how many people died in the attack or independently determine responsibility.
Videos posted on social media showed piles of bodies strewn across the muddy ground, with their suitcases and backpacks scattered around them. Three survivors said more than 200 people had died, while one witness said he saw at least 70 bodies.
Reuters He verified the location of the videos just outside the coastal town of Maungdaw in Myanmar. Reuters He could not independently confirm the date the videos were filmed.
A witness, Mohammed Eleyas, 35, said his pregnant wife and 2-year-old daughter were wounded in the attack and later died. He was with them on the shoreline when the drones began targeting the crowd, Eleyas said. Reuters from a refugee camp in Bangladesh.
“I heard the deafening sound of shelling several times,” he said. Eleyas said he lay down on the ground to protect himself and when he got up, he saw his wife and daughter seriously injured and many of his other relatives dead.
A second witness, Shamsuddin, 28, said he survived with his wife and newborn son. Also speaking from a refugee camp in Bangladesh, he said that after the attack many lay dead and “some people were screaming in pain from their wounds.”
Boats carrying fleeing Rohingyas, members of a mostly Muslim minority facing extreme persecution in Myanmar, also sank on Monday in the Naf River separating the two countries, killing dozens more, according to two witnesses and Bangladeshi media.
Doctors Without Borders said in a statement that the aid organization had treated 39 people who had crossed from Myanmar into Bangladesh since Saturday for violence-related injuries, including mortar shell wounds and gunshot wounds. The patients described seeing people being shelled as they tried to find boats to cross the river, the statement said.
A spokesman for the UN Refugee Agency said the agency was “aware of refugee deaths from the capsizing of two boats in the Bay of Bengal” and had heard reports of civilian deaths in Maungdaw, but could not confirm numbers or circumstances.
Fighting in the region
The Rohingya have long been persecuted in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. More than 730,000 of them fled the country in 2017 following a military offensive that the UN says was genocidal in nature.
Myanmar has been in chaos since the military seized power from a democratically elected government in 2021, with mass protests evolving into widespread armed struggle.
Rohingya have been fleeing Rakhine for weeks as the Arakan Army, one of many armed groups fighting, has made sweeping advances in the north, home to a large Muslim population.
Reuters The group has previously reported that the militia burned down the largest Rohingya town in May, leaving Maungdaw, which is under siege by rebels, as the last major Rohingya settlement apart from grim displacement camps further south. The group denied the allegations.
Activist groups condemned this week's attacks. A senior Western diplomat said he had confirmed the reports.
“I regret to say that these reports of hundreds of Rohingya being killed on the Bangladesh-Myanmar border are accurate,” Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations and a former special envoy to Myanmar, posted on X on Wednesday.
Myanmar's junta blamed the Arakan Army in a post on its Telegram channel.
The militia denied responsibility. “According to our investigation, relatives of terrorists tried to go to Bangladesh from Maungdaw and the junta dropped the bomb because they left without permission,” Arakan Army spokesman Khine Thu Kha told Reuters, referring to Muslims who have joined Rohingya armed groups fighting the Arakan Army.
