Alwaght- An international medical charity group says at least 6,700 members of the persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority group were killed in ongoing state-sponsored ethnic only in a period of one month beginning on August 25.
The announcement was made by Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French acronym MSF, on Thursday.
"At least 6,700 Rohingya, in the most conservative estimations, are estimated to have been killed, including at least 730 children below the age of five years," the aid group said.
The MSF said the figures had come from six surveys of more than 2,434 households in Rohingya refugee camps and covered a period of one month.
“We met and spoke with survivors of violence in Myanmar, who are now sheltering in overcrowded and unsanitary camps in Bangladesh,” said the group’s medical director, Sidney Wong.
“What we uncovered was staggering, both in terms of the numbers of people who reported a family member died as a result of violence, and the horrific ways in which they said they were killed or severely injured,” he added.
The MSF said that gunshot wounds had been the cause of death in 69 percent of the cases after Myanmar’s army launched “clearance operations” in Rakhine state.
Another nine percent were reported burned alive inside houses, while five percent died from fatal beatings, according to the MSF survey.
Myanmar has barred foreign groups and reporters from entering Rakhine, which has been under military siege since late last year and where horrific violence is being reported against the minority Rohingya Muslims.
More than 600,000 Rohingya Muslims have sought sanctuary in Bangladesh after the military in the Buddhist-majority Myanmar intensified the crackdown in villages across the northern parts of Rakhine State on August 25, using a number of armed attacks on security checkpoints as a pretext.
UN’s top rights official Zeid Ra‘ad al-Hussein has described the latest crackdown against Rohingya Muslims as textbook' example of ethnic cleansing. He said: “I call on the government to end its current cruel military operation, with accountability for all violations that have occurred, and to reverse the pattern of severe and widespread discrimination against the Rohingya population”.
