Fighting between rival Rohingya insurgent groups left one dead, while hundreds of makeshift shelters were torched on the Bangladesh-Myanmar border, police and witnesses said Thursday.
Wednesday's clashes are the first known clashes between opposing armed factions of the stateless minority.
RSO Attack
Nearly a million Rohingyas have lived in huge refugee camps in Bangladesh since they fled Burma in 2017.
The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), one of the groups involved in the clash, has been accused of drug trafficking and the murder of refugee leaders who oppose its operations.
According to Rohingya sources, hundreds of militants from the lesser known Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO) launched a pre-dawn attack on an ARSA relay post in no man's land on the border between Bangladesh and Burma.
Attack “facilitated” by the Bangladeshi police, for a camp official
At least one person has been killed, a medical staff member at a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) clinic told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Three other people were treated for gunshot wounds at the clinic, including a child shot in the hand, he added.
Dil Mohammad, an official at the refugee camp where the violence took place, said most of the shelters in the camp were set on fire during the assault.
“
Eighty percent of the houses, which number in the hundreds, were burnt down.
Many fled to Burma and many fled to Bangladesh
,” he said.
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According to Dil Mohammad, the elite Bangladeshi police unit, the Rapid Action Battalion, facilitated the RSO attack, after an officer from that unit was killed several months ago.
He said Burmese soldiers fired in the air to prevent fleeing Rohingya from entering their territory.
A senior ARSA leader who fought in Wednesday's clashes also told AFP that Bangladeshi security forces were involved in the RSO attack.
"
They burned hundreds of Rohingya homes and used heavy weapons
," he said.
The governor denies
District government administrator Romen Sharma denied that Bangladeshi security forces were involved.
“
This incident happened at the international border of Bangladesh and Myanmar.
We have no jurisdiction
,” he told AFP.
Police and border forces in Bangladesh could not be reached by AFP, and a spokesman for the Burmese military junta did not immediately respond.
A series of ARSA attacks on Myanmar security posts in 2017 sparked a brutal military crackdown that forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh.
The abuses committed during this crackdown are now the subject of a UN genocide investigation.
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