Myanmar’s junta navy arrested round 80 Rohingya trying to flee the nation by boat, residents who witnessed the occasion advised Radio Free Asia on Thursday.
Officers arrested the group on Tuesday morning in Myanmar’s coastal Mon state. The boat was intercepted off the shores of Ye township’s Kaleguak Island within the Andaman Sea.
Mon state’s junta spokesperson Aung Myat Kyaw Sein advised RFA that though Mon’s administration was made conscious of the arrest, different particulars have but to be confirmed.
“The estimated quantity is about 80, however we have no idea the genders but,” he mentioned, including that unspecified official processes nonetheless must be carried out.
The arrested Rohingya will likely be handled properly and officers will comply with official procedures, he mentioned.
RFA was in a position to verify the group traveled on a ship named Zwel Khit San, however couldn’t determine the place the group traveled from or the place it meant to go.
Many Rohingya who had remained in Rakhine state after being focused in a genocide by the Myanmar navy in 2017 fled to Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia following the nation’s 2021 coup. In October and November 2023, junta troops arrested over 200 Rohingya escaping to close by international locations by boat, citing job shortage, unemployment and rising restrictions positioned on the ethnic minority.
After junta troops introduced the enactment of the Folks’s Army Service Legislation on Feb. 10, movies originating from Rakhine state’s west a month later confirmed Rohingya present process navy coaching. Troops have additionally preyed on Rohingya in internally displaced folks’s camps, providing them freedom of motion in change for bolstering the junta’s numbers.
Mon state residents mentioned that junta forces arrested 117 Rohingya on a rubber farm in Thanbyuzayat township’s Struggle Kha Yu village in January, however the reason being nonetheless unknown.
The Workplace of the United Nations Excessive Commissioner for Refugees reported on Jan. 23 that in 2023, not less than 569 Rohingya died and went lacking after leaving Myanmar and refugee camps in Bangladesh.
Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Kiana Duncan and Mike Firn.