Photo credit: NDTV
At least eight Rohingya Muslims, including women and children, were killed and several others injured early Monday after heavy monsoon rains triggered multiple landslides at refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh, officials said.
Asiaone reports that more than 1.2 million Rohingya live in overcrowded camps in Cox’s Bazar, the world’s largest refugee settlement, after fleeing a 2017 military crackdown in neighbouring Buddhist-majority Myanmar, where they are accused of being outsiders.
Most families live in makeshift shelters made of bamboo and plastic sheets on steep, deforested hillsides that are highly vulnerable to landslides during the annual monsoon season.
The landslides hit four locations across the camps, burying shelters under mud and debris while residents were asleep.
A Bangladeshi man was killed and two family members were injured when part of a hillside collapsed onto their house in Cox’s Bazar, police said.
“We were asleep when the landslides struck,” said Ali Ahmed, who lost three family members when their bamboo-and-tarpaulin shelter was buried in the disaster.
“Fire service personnel and neighbours rescued us, but my mother, father and younger brother did not survive.
“We fled Myanmar in 2017 to escape persecution. Now I’ve lost my family here too, and I don ‘t know what lies ahead for me.
Continued rainfall had increased the risk of further landslides, with thousands of refugees living on unstable slopes, said Tumpa Das, a police official in Cox’s Bazar.
“Every time heavy rain begins, fear spreads through the camps,” said Rohingya refugee Mohammed Taher. “Thousands live in bamboo-and-tarpaulin shelters on unstable hillsides, where even a minor landslide can become a deadly disaster.”
Renewed fighting in Myanmar’s Rakhine State has raised concern of a fresh influx of Rohingya refugees across the border.
Bangladeshi authorities have stepped up monitoring along the frontier amid reports of people gathering near the border seeking to enter the country.
