At least 15 people have been killed in a fire that tore through a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh, while 400 are still missing, the UN refugee agency said.
“It’s massive, it’s devastating,” said Johannes van der Klaauw, UNHCR. He joined a letter from Geneva, virtually from Dhaka, Bangladesh. “We still have 400 people, but somewhere in the rubble,” he said.
He added that the UNHCR had reports of 560 people injured and 45,000 people displaced.
The fire tore through the Balukhali camp near the southeastern city of Cox’s Bazar late Monday and burned through thousands of huts as people scrambled to save their belongings.
“Everything passed. Thousands are homeless, “Aman Ullah, a Rohingya refugee from the Balukhali camp, told Reuters.
“The fire was brought under control after six hours, but it can be seen that some parts of the camp smoke all night.”
“The cause of the fire is still unknown,” senior police officer Zakir Hossain Khan said by telephone from the camps. “Authorities are investigating the cause of the fire.”
Sanjeev Kafley, the head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ delegation in Bangladesh, said more than 17,000 shelters had been destroyed and tens of thousands displaced.
More than 1,000 Red Cross staffers and volunteers worked with firefighters to put out the blaze, spread across four parts of the camp with about 124,000 people, about one-tenth of the estimated 1 million Rohingya refugees in the area, he added. .
“I was in Cox’s Bazar for three and a half years and have never seen such a fire,” he told Reuters. “These people have been displaced twice. For many, there is nothing left. ”