Bangladesh has launched an investigation into a huge blaze that ripped through a sprawling Rohingya refugee camp and forced at least 50,000 people to flee. Seven people are feared dead in the biggest fire to hit the shanty settlement to date.
Nearly 1 million of the Muslim minority from Myanmar live in cramped and squalid conditions at the camps in the Cox’s Bazar district, with many fleeing a military crackdown in their homeland in 2017.
Officials said the fire on Monday was believed to have started in one of the 34 camps – which span about 8,000 acres (3,237 hectares) of land – before spreading to two other camps.
Police have so far confirmed only two deaths after recovering the bodies. But Rohingya witnesses said several people had died in the blaze that has left tens of thousands with no shelter.
Local fire service chief Shahdat Hoassain told AFP: “We have learnt seven people have died including two children, a woman and four adult men”.
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.
Some witnesses said barbed wire fencing around the camp had trapped many people, causing some of the casualties and leading international humanitarian agencies to call for its removal.
Humanitarian organisation Refugees International that many children were missing and “some were unable to flee because of barbed wire set up in the camps”.
Police said the cause of the fire was still unknown.
Gazi Salahuddin, a police inspector, said the fire was initially small and confined to a narrow strip, but it grew and raced to other camps after gas cylinders used for cooking exploded.
Officials told AFP a preliminary assessment found that more than 900 shanties – home to about 7,400 refugees – had been gutted, with the blaze still burning.
Mohammad Yasin, a Rohingya man helping with the firefighting, told AFP the blaze was still raging eight hours after it started and was the worst he had seen since 2017.
A Save the Children volunteer, Tayeba Begum, said “people were screaming and running here and there [and] children were also running scattered crying for their family”.
It was the third blaze to hit the camps in four days, fire brigade official, Sikder, who goes by only one name, told AFP.
Two separate fires at the camps on Friday destroyed scores of shanties, officials said then.
Two big blazes had also hit the camps in January, leaving thousands homeless and gutting four Unicef schools.
Amnesty International’s South Asia campaigner, Saad Hammadi, tweeted that the “frequency of fire in the camps is too coincidental, especially when outcomes of previous investigations into the incidents are not known and they keep repeating”.
The government has meanwhile been pushing the refugees to relocate to a remote island in the Bay of Bengal, saying the camps were too crowded.
So far, 13,000 Rohingya have been moved to the flood-prone island that critics say is in the path of deadly cyclones.