Rohingya camp blaze in Bangladesh: 15 dead, 400 missing, 10,000 shelters destroyed, says UN
By Team Newsable | First Published Mar 23, 2021, 3:59 PM IST“We have so far confirmed 15 people dead, 560 injured, 400 are still missing and at least 10,000 shelters have been destroyed. That means at least 45,000 people are being displaced and for whom we now seek provisional shelter.”
Geneva: Fifteen people have so far been confirmed dead and 400 are still missing in the huge blaze at the Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, the United Nations said Tuesday.
“What we have seen in this fire is something we have never seen before in these camps. It is massive. It is devastating,” Johannes van der Klaauw, the UN Refugee Agency’s representative in Bangladesh, told reporters in Geneva via video-link from Dhaka.
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“We have so far confirmed 15 people dead, 560 injured, 400 are still missing and at least 10,000 shelters have been destroyed. That means at least 45,000 people are being displaced and for whom we now seek provisional shelter.”
At least 20,000 Rohingya have fled a huge blaze engulfing shanty homes at refugee camps in south eastern Bangladesh, officials said Monday, in the third fire to hit the settlements in four days.
Nearly one million of the Muslim minority from Myanmar - many of whom fled a military crackdown in their homeland in 2017 - live in cramped and squalid conditions at the camps in the Cox's Bazar district.
Bangladeshi officials began investigating the cause of a massive fire that left several dead at a Rohingya refugee camp, as officials sifted through the debris looking for more victims on Tuesday.
Officials said the fire apparently started in one of the 34 camps - which span about 8,000 acres (3,237 hectares) of land -- before spreading to three other camps, with refugees fleeing the shanties with whatever belongings they could carry.
The fire ripped through the Balukhali camp near the southeastern town of Cox's Bazar late on Monday, burning through hundreds of homes as people raced to recover their meagre possessions.
Thick columns of smoke could be seen billowing from blazing shanties in video shared on social media, as hundreds of firefighters and aid workers battled the flames and pulled the refugees to safety.
(With inputs from agency)
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