Massive Fire Blazed in Rohingya Camps Over 15 People Burnt and Killed

At least 15 people have been killed in a massive fire that ripped through a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh, while 400 remain missing, the United Nations refugee agency said.

“It is massive, it is devastating,” said the UNHCR’s Johannes van der Klaauw, who joined a Geneva briefing virtually from Dhaka on Tuesday.

“We still have 400 people unaccounted for, maybe somewhere in the rubble,” he said, adding that the UNHCR has reports of 560 people injured and 45,000 people displaced.

Bangladeshi officials said they are investigating the cause of the massive fire as officials sifted through the debris looking for more victims.

The fire ripped through the Balukhali camp near the southeastern town of Cox’s Bazar late on Monday, burning through thousands of huts as people scrambled to save their meagre possessions.

The vast majority of the people in the camps fled Myanmar in 2017 amid a military-led crackdown on the Rohingya that UN investigators said was executed with “genocidal intent”, a charge Myanmar denies.