(PA) -- Amnesty International reported two people were wounded on Sunday as 300,000 Rohingya have fled into Bangladesh the past fortnight following what they deem government-sponsored persecution.
Refugee accounts of the latest outbreak of violence in Rakhine have typically described shootings by soldiers and arson attacks on villages in Myanmar, also known as Myanmar.
But there several cases that point to anti-personnel land mines or other explosives as the cause of injuries on the border with Bangladesh. Myanmar has one of the few armies, along with North Korea and Syria, which has openly used anti-personnel land mines in recent years, according to Amnesty. An international treaty in 1997 outlawed the use of the weapons with Bangladesh among the signatories, but Myanmar opting not to.
Lieutenant Colonel SM Ariful Islam, commanding officer of the Bangladesh border guard in Teknaf, said on Friday he was aware of at least three Rohingya injured in explosions.
Bangladeshi officials and Amnesty researchers believe new explosives have been recently planted, including one that the rights group said blew off a Bangladeshi farmer’s leg and another that wounded a Rohingya man.
Both incidents occurred on Sunday, while it is reported at least three people including two children were injured in the past week. “It may not be land mines, but I know there have been isolated cases of Myanmar soldiers planting explosives three to four days ago,” Mr Ariful said on Friday.
Myanmar presidential spokesman did not answer phone calls seeking comment on Sunday.
Military spokesman Myat Min Oo said he couldn’t comment without talking to his superiors, while a major at the Border Guard Police headquarters in northern Maungdaw near the Bangladesh border also refused to comment.
Amnesty said that based on interviews with eyewitnesses and analysis by its own weapons experts, it believes there is “targeted use of landlines” along a narrow stretch of the northwestern border of Rakhine state that is a crossing point for fleeing Rohingya.
“All indications point to the Myanmar security forces deliberately targeting locations that Rohingya refugees use as crossing points,” Amnesty official Tirana Hassan said in a statement on Sunday. She called it “a cruel and callous way of adding to the misery of people fleeing a systematic campaign of persecution”.
Accounts from refugees show the Myanmar's military is also targeting civilians with shootings and wholesale burning of Rohingya villages in an apparent attempt to purge Rakhine state of Muslims.
Bloody anti-Muslim rioting that erupted in 2012 in Rakhine state forced more than 100,000 Rohingya into displacement camps in Bangladesh, where many still live today.
Rohingya have faced decades of discrimination and persecution in Myanmar and are denied citizenship despite centuries-old roots in the Rakhine region.
Myanmar denies Rohingya exist as an ethnic group and says those living in Rakhine are illegal migrants from Bangladesh.
(Photo: PA)