“More than 300 refugees from Myanmar are being searched for in the Straits of Malacca after the disaster of three boats. The search continues.”, — write: www.pravda.com.ua
Source: The Telegraph, Reuters
Details: According to the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA), one of the boats sank on Thursday. Rescuers recovered a woman’s body on Saturday, and six more bodies on Sunday, after which the operation was temporarily suspended. The search operation is planned to resume on Monday.
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A search and rescue operation was launched after receiving reports of people adrift in the sea. The search operation covered an area of 170 square nautical miles in the Malacca Strait.
According to preliminary information, the migrants left the city of Butidaung in the state of Rakhine in Myanmar, where the conflict on ethnic grounds continues.
The MMEA reports that at first the passengers were on one large vessel, and then they were transferred to three smaller boats, one hundred people each. This tactic was probably used to avoid detection while approaching the coast of Malaysia.
MMEA First Admiral Romli Mustafa said there was a high probability of finding more bodies.
The disaster is another episode in a long-running crisis related to the persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar. Rakhine State has been plagued by violence and a humanitarian crisis for years.
After a brutal military crackdown in 2017 that the United Nations described as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” some 1.3 million Rohingya have fled to overcrowded refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh.
According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), around 5,200 Rohingya refugees have ventured on the perilous sea journey since the beginning of the year. Almost 600 of them are considered missing or dead.
For reference: Myanmar has been in a state of civil war since February 2021, when the military led by Min Aung Hlaing staged a coup d’état, seizing power from the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. Since then, NGOs estimate that the junta has killed more than 7,300 people.
Prehistory:
- Earlier, the media reported that the military junta of Myanmar carried out an air attack on the school in the central region of the country, where local residents gathered for a Buddhist festival. Bombs dropped from a motorized paraglider killed at least 24 people, including children, and injured more than 50 others.
- In addition, criminal syndicates running huge “cyberfraud centers” in Myanmar are reported to have resorted to extreme brutality, including torturing and killing slave laborers, whose bodies are then dumped in rivers. Hundreds of thousands of people who were lured by promises of legal work from different parts of the world, found themselves in slaverywhere they are forced to engage in online scams under threat of death.