Bangladeshi authorities are investigating the cause of a massive fire at a Rohingya refugee camp that left 12,000 people homeless.
No casualties were reported, but Sunday’s fire destroyed 2,000 shelters after it spread quickly through gas cylinders in the kitchen, officials said.
Police are investigating whether the fire was an act of sabotage. According to local media, one person has been detained.
Located in the southeast, this camp is considered to be the largest refugee camp in the world.
Most of its inhabitants, Rohingya refugees, fled persecution in neighboring Myanmar.
On Monday, hundreds of people returned to the Cox’s Bazar area to see what they could salvage from the ruins.
The fire started at around 14:45 local time on Sunday (08:45 GMT) and quickly broke out in bamboo and tarpaulin shelters, an official said.
“About 2,000 shelters have been burned down, leaving almost 12,000 forcibly displaced Myanmar citizens homeless,” Mizanur Rahman, Bangladesh’s refugee commissioner, told JEE News.
He added that the fire was brought under control within three hours but at least 35 mosques and 21 educational centers for refugees were also destroyed.
Images are now emerging that show the extent of the devastation.
Many of the residents can be seen picking through the burned area, where only the metal struts and the corrugated iron roof remain.
Hrusikesh Harichandan of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies told JEE News that the camp had suffered “extensive damage”.
Basic services like water centers and testing facilities have also been affected, he said.
“My shelter was destroyed. [My shop] was also burnt,” Mamoon Johar, a 30-year-old Rohingya man, told JEE News.
“The fire took everything from me.”
Thick black clouds were seen rising over Camp 11, one of many areas in the border district where more than a million Rohingya refugees live.
Harden Lang from Refugees International said it would be difficult to relocate the estimated 12,000 people affected by the fire given already overcrowded conditions in the “megacamp”.
Providing basic services to these people in other parts of the camp will also be a challenge as many services – health clinics, schools – have been destroyed.
“This is essentially an acute event in what was already a chronically very vulnerable and precariously prepared population,” he told JEE News.
The camps, overcrowded and poor, have long suffered from fires.
According to a report released last month by the Ministry of Defense of Bangladesh, between January 2021 and December 2022, there were 222 incidents of fires in Rohingya camps, including 60 incidents of arson.
In March 2021, a camp fire in Basti killed at least 15 people and displaced around 50,000.
The refugee camp houses people who fled Myanmar after a military crackdown on the Rohingya ethnic minority.
The Rohingya are Muslims in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, where they have faced persecution for generations.
The latest exodus of Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh began in August 2017, when Myanmar’s military retaliated brutally after a Rohingya insurgent group attacked several police posts.
