The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said more than 550 shelters, home to some 3,500 people, were completely or partially destroyed by the blaze, as well as 150 shops and a facility belonging to an organization. non-profit.
Photographs and video provided to Reuters by a Rohingya refugee in Nayapara camp showed families going through the charred corrugated iron sheets to retrieve them. But little remains of the camp, which had been there for decades, apart from the concrete poles and barks of some trees.
“Everyone is crying,” said refugee Mohammed Arakani. “They lost all their belongings. They lost everything, they burned completely, they lost all their possessions.”
UNHCR said it provided shelter, supplies, winter clothing, hot food and medical care to displaced refugees from the Cox’s Bazar district camp, a fraction of land bordering Myanmar in southeast Bangladesh.
“Security experts are in contact with authorities to investigate the cause of the fire,” the agency said, adding that no casualties were reported.
Onno van Manen, country director of Save the Children in Bangladesh, called the fire “again devastating for Rohingya who have suffered indescribable hardship for years.”
Mohammed Shamsud Douza, the deputy official of the Bangladeshi government in charge of refugees, said the fire service spent two hours putting out the fire, but that it was hampered by the explosion of gas cylinders inside the houses.
The Bangladeshi government has relocated several thousand Rohingya to a remote island in recent weeks, despite protests by human rights groups saying some of the relocations were forced, allegations denied by authorities.
More than a million Rohingya live in camps in the southern mainland of Bangladesh, the vast majority fleeing Myanmar in 2017 from military-led crackdown that UN investigators said was carried out with “genocidal intent,” Myanmar denounces.
According to the refugees, the fire destroyed part of a Rohingya-inhabited camp that fled Myanmar after a previous military campaign.