Bangladeshi border guards have sent back 136 Rohingya Muslims from Burma after a clash with a group of illegal migrants who had crossed into Bangladesh on Friday. The deportees include women and children.
Reuters reported, a local commander from the paramilitary Border Guards Bangladesh (BGB) unit, Colonel Mohammad Khalekuzzaman, said the migrants were from Burma`s Rohingya Muslim community, a mostly stateless minority living in often grim conditions.According to Khalekuzzaman, at least 300 Rohingya crossed from Burma into Bangladesh and were making their way by road to the Kutupalong refugee camp near the town of Cox`s Bazar when they were stopped at a BGB checkpoint set up after a tip-off.
“A group of Rohingya, along with local residents, opened fire and threw stones at us,” said Khalekuzzaman, adding that BGB guards fired warning shots in response. One guard received a gunshot wound and was taken to a hospital in Cox` Bazar.
Some of the migrants fled and were assumed to have taken shelter with local residents, Khalekuzzaman said, while the 136 who were captured were sent back to Burma.
Thousands of Rohingya have fled Buddhist-majority Burma since religious violence there in 2012, some of them falling into the hands of human traffickers who routinely hold them in remote camps in Thailand and demand ransom for their release.
Cox`s Bazar lies close to the Burma border, some 400 km (250 miles) southeast of the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka.
Bangladesh faced influx of Rohinyia refugees from Burma in the seventies, eighties and the nineties, and sent back many of them by way of negotiations. Since the start of the present crisis with the denial of national identify cards to the Rohingya Muslims by the Burmese authorities the problem has assumed new dimensions. The authorities in Bangladesh want the problem to be resolved in the land of origin of the Rohingya Muslims – Burma.
