A massive fire burned more than a thousand homes this Sunday in a Rohingya refugee camp in southern Bangladesh, an official source said, with no fatalities reported so far.
"According to our estimates, 1,040 shelters have been destroyed" in Kutupalong Camp No. 5, said fire station chief of the southern Cox's Bazar region, Atish Chakma.
According to the source, the fire started at dawn and firefighters managed to put out the flames in about two hours, with no injuries or missing persons reported at the moment.
Rohingya refugee camps are susceptible to fires due to overcrowding and the materials with which their homes are built, mainly bamboo and plastic.
The last major fire in this area, on March 5, 2023, destroyed more than 3,000 shelters and 155 infrastructure, such as hospitals and educational centers, displacing more than 32,000 refugees.
An investigation by Bangladeshi authorities concluded that it was an act of sabotage. According to the Bangladeshi Ministry of Defense, of the 222 fires recorded in Rohingya camps between January 2021 and December 2022, at least 60 were arson.
Bangladesh hosts nearly a million Rohingya refugees fleeing neighboring Burma. Among them, some 774,000 who fled to the country during the wave of violence by the Burmese Army in 2017, an operation that the UN described as ethnic cleansing and possible genocide.
