Rohingya: Big fire erupts at Rohingya camp in B’desh, 12,000 people homeless

KUTUPALONG: A fireplace destroyed 2,000 shelters at a Rohingya refugee camp in southeastern Bangladesh on Sunday, leaving round 12,000 individuals homeless, an official mentioned. The fireplace broke out round 2.45pm (native time) at camp quantity 11 in Kutupalong, one of many world’s largest refugee settlements, and quickly engulfed the bamboo-and-tarpaulin shelters, Mijanur Rahman, Bangladesh’s refugee commissioner, mentioned. Not less than 35 mosques and 21 studying centres for the refugees had been additionally destroyed, although there have been no stories of any accidents or deaths, he added.
“My shelter was gutted. (My store) was additionally burnt,” mentioned Mamun Johar, a 30-year-old Rohingya man. “The fireplace took every little thing from me, every little thing.”
The blaze was introduced underneath management in lower than three hours. It was not clear how the fireplace began. The authorities have ordered an investigation. Fires are frequent within the camps the place almost a million Rohingya refugees dwell in squalid situations. Most of them fled a army crackdown in Myanmar’s Rakhine state in 2017 and took refuge in Bangladesh.
A Bangladesh defence ministry report final month mentioned that between January 2021 and December 2022, there have been 222 fireplace incidents within the Rohingya camps – together with 60 circumstances of arson. In March 2021, in what was the worst blaze within the Rohingya camps, no less than 15 individuals had been killed and a few 50,000 had been displaced after a hearth engulfed a whole block in a settlement.