A landslide struck a girls’ school inside a refugee camp in Bangladesh, killing seven students and a teacher. On Wednesday afternoon, mud and debris buried the Islamic study center in the coastal city of Cox’s Bazar, prompting a desperate search and rescue operation. The number of people inside the school is unknown. The country has been pummeled by monsoon rains since Sunday, with many deadly landslides recorded in Cox’s Bazar.
The largest refugee camp in the world is home to over a million Rohingya who escaped a violent military crackdown in Myanmar. According to Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner, eight of the 13 persons rescued from the muck that swallowed their school hut perished.A local district officer named Panna Akhter informed BBC Bangla that some of them are seven, eight, eleven, or twelve years old. For treatment, the other five kids were brought to the hospital.
At least eight Rohingya refugees, including five children, have been killed by additional landslides since Sunday, according to earlier reports from officials. During an army operation in Myanmar in 2017, thousands of Rohingya, one of the country’s numerous ethnic minorities, were slaughtered, and over 700,000 fled to neighboring Bangladesh. The government of Myanmar, a country with a majority of Buddhists, denies citizenship to the minority, which is mainly Muslim.
In Bangladesh, many people live in substandard housing made of bamboo and tarpaulin on steep hillsides. Authorities are warning of more landslides and floods and relocating residents in high-risk regions as more rain is predicted over the next few days.
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