New Delhi: A huge blaze that ripped through a sprawling Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh has forced at least 50,000 people to flee and left seven people dead, officials and aid workers said, in the biggest fire to hit the shanty settlement to date.
Nearly one million of the persecuted 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 southeastern Cox’s Bazar district.
It is the third fire to hit the camps in four days.
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 U.N. refugee agency said on Tuesday.
“It is massive, it is devastating,” said the UNHCR’s Johannes van der Klaauw, who joined a Geneva briefing virtually from Dhaka, Bangladesh. “We still have 400 people unaccounted for, maybe somewhere in the rubble,” he said.
He added that the UNHCR has reports of 560 people injured and 45,000 people displaced.
Officials said the latest blaze appeared to have started on Monday 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.
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 refugees to safety.
Firefighters brought the blaze under control around midnight, with the Refugees International saying at least 50,000 people fled their shanties as the fire reduced thousands of shelters made of tarp and bamboo to ashes.
