Bangladesh: Fire guts over 60 Rohingya tents at Cox’s Bazar camp

By Md. Kamruzzaman

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AA): More than 60 makeshift tents of Rohingya refugees at a camp in Bangladesh’s southern Cox’s Bazar district were gutted in a fire late Tuesday, according to Rohingya and official sources.

“We primarily came to know that the fire originated from a cooking gas cylinder of a Rohingya tent and spread to the adjacent shelters,” Shah Rezwan Hayat, Bangladesh’s refugee relief and repatriation commissioner, told Anadolu Agency.

The fire erupted in Block B of camp No. 9 in the Balukhali Rohingya refugee camp.

Hayat confirmed that more than 20 Rohingya tents were damaged by the fire and one Rohingya was slightly injured and admitted to a hospital.

He added that the gutted tents would be replaced within the shortest possible time.

Meanwhile, citing Rohingya at a camp, the local Prothom Alo newspaper reported that 63 Rohingya dwellings were burnt to ashes in the fire.

“At least 4-5 Rohingya were injured while trying to control the blaze,” the report said, adding some children are missing.

A major fire in the world’s largest Rohingya camp killed at least 15 members of the community on March 22 this year. In that incident, more than 10,000 shanties were burnt to the ground along with a camp-based Turkish field hospital.

Another fire killed three Rohingya and damaged seven shops in a market inside the camp on April 2, while four tents including an Islamic seminary (madrassah) were burnt down on April 12.

In mid-January, a deadly fire destroyed over 500 Rohingya shanties. Dozens of other minor fires have also broken out in the congested Rohingya camps in the last couple of years.

More than 1.1 million Rohingya who mostly fled a brutal military crackdown in Rakhine State of their home country Myanmar in August 2017 have been living in the makeshift camps in Bangladesh.

[Archive Photo: A view from the Rohingya refugee camp in Ukhia after a big fire swept through the camp and destroyed thousands of homes killing at least 25 people in Ukhia, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh on March 24, 2021. Photographer: Stringer/AA]

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