The fire was brought under control in less than three hours.
Kutupalong:
A fire at a Rohingya refugee camp in southeastern Bangladesh destroyed 2,000 shelters on Sunday, leaving some 12,000 people homeless, an official said.
Mizanur Rahman, Bangladesh’s refugee commissioner, told AFP that the fire broke out at around 2:45 p.m. (0845 GMT) at camp number 11 in Kutupalong, one of the world’s largest refugee settlements, and quickly engulfed bamboo and tarpaulin shelters. Took in
“Nearly 2,000 shelters have been burnt down, leaving approximately 12,000 forcibly displaced Myanmarese citizens without shelter,” he said.
He said at least 35 mosques and 21 educational centers for the refugees were also destroyed, although there were no reports of injuries or deaths.
Mamoon Johar, a 30-year-old Rohingya man, said, “My shelter was destroyed. (My shop) was also burnt.”
“The fire took everything from me, everything.”
The fire was brought under control in less than three hours.
It was not clear how the fire started. The authorities have ordered an inquiry.
Fires are common in the camps where some one million Rohingya refugees live in poor conditions.
Most of them fled a military crackdown in Myanmar’s Rakhine state in 2017 and took refuge in Bangladesh.
Last month, a Bangladesh Defense Ministry report said that between January 2021 and December 2022, there were 222 incidents of fires in Rohingya camps—including 60 cases of arson.
In March 2021, at least 15 people were killed and some 50,000 displaced in the deadliest fire in the Rohingya camps when the fire engulfed an entire block of a settlement.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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