At least two people were killed Monday in a village in Bangladesh by mortar shells fired from neighboring Burma, in a border spillover of fighting raging in that country, police said.
Parts of Burma close to the 270 km border with Bangladesh have seen frequent clashes since November, when Arakan Army (AA) fighters ended a largely respected ceasefire since coup d'état of 2021.
“The two people were killed in the village of Jalpaitoli during shooting around 2:15 p.m. local time (8:15 a.m. GMT)
,” local police chief Abdul Mannan told AFP.
Police said a Bangladeshi woman, Hosne Ara, 48, and an unnamed Rohingya man were killed.
“They were sitting in their kitchen... when a mortar hit
,” said Hosne Ara’s daughter-in-law, too upset to give her name.
“At least 95 Burmese border agents”
are said to have crossed the border
At the time of the incident, she
was “serving lunch to the Rohingya who had been hired by the family for agricultural work”
.
Bangladesh Interior Minister Asaduzzaman Khan said on Sunday that at least 14 border guards from Rakhine state in Burma
"entered"
Bangladeshi territory
"to protect themselves"
from the advance of AA rebel fighters.
The AA, made up of fighters from an ethnic minority, has for years waged an intermittent war for autonomy for the ethnic Rakhine population, who live near the border with Bangladesh.
A spokesperson for the Bangladesh border guards told AFP on Monday that
“at least 95 Burmese border agents”
had crossed the border to take refuge
“in Bangladeshi border posts”
.
The NGO Doctors Without Borders (MSF) indicated on Sunday that its doctors in the Bangladeshi port city of Cox's Bazar had
“received a large number of wounded following the fighting at the border”
.
“All had gunshot wounds
,” MSF said on Monday.
“Two of them were in danger of death and five seriously injured”
.
In October, an alliance including AA insurgents and other ethnic minority fighters launched a joint offensive in northern Burma, seizing trading places on the Chinese border.
In January, the military in power in Burma and three armed groups announced that they had reached a ceasefire agreement, facilitated by Beijing, in the north of the country.
This agreement, however, does not apply to areas near the borders of Bangladesh and India, where fighting continues.
Bangladesh is already home to around a million Rohingya refugees, driven out of Burma during a military crackdown in 2017.