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Mine blast kills 4 Rohingya children in Myanmar’s Rakhine

Tuesday, 07 January 2020 5:38 PM [ Last Update: Tuesday, 07 January 2020 5:44 PM ]

This photo, taken on October 3, 2019, shows people walking in Kyauktalone Camp in Kyaukphyu, Rakhine State, Myanmar, where Muslim residents have been forced to live for seven years after the inter-communal unrest tore the town apart. (By AFP)

Four Rohingya Muslim children have been killed and some others injured in a landmine explosion in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State, where state-sponsored violence has prevailed in recent years.

Local sources said a group of local Rohingya was harvesting firewood in the forest near Hteiktoo Pauk Village in Kyauktaw Township when the mine exploded early Tuesday.

“Four children, two of them eight years old and two of them 10, were killed on the spot,” Thaung Shwe, a lawmaker for the area, said.

Six other Rohingya — one adult man and five teenage boys — were also injured in the explosion, he added.

One local village leader, who asked not to be named, told AFP that the number of casualties and the lack of a blast crater made him doubt that it had been a mine. “Some people say a mine explosion, some say this was from heavy shelling.”

Military spokesman Brigadier General Zaw Min Tun said that the wounded were being treated at local hospitals and three were in serious conditions. He claimed that the landmine had been laid by forces from the Arakan Army, an ethnic insurgent group that recruits mostly from Rakhine’s Buddhist majority.

Contradicting the claim by the military, a spokesman for the rebels, who want more autonomy for Rakhine State, accused the military of having planted the landmine.

The region came to global attention in 2017 when more than 750,000 Rohingya, mostly women and children, fled to neighboring Bangladesh to escape a military crackdown that UN investigators have said was carried out with “genocidal intent.” Bangladesh was already hosting some 200,000 Rohingya when the exodus began.