The UN warned on Thursday that more than 500 people were feared dead following reports of two large shipwrecks off Myanmar since late June.
The UN’s International Organization for Migration and its refugee agency UNHCR voiced alarm in a joint statement at reports “that two boats carrying more than 500 people may have capsized off the coast of Myanmar in recent days”.
Preliminary information indicated that the two vessels in question departed from war-torn Myanmar’s Rakhine state in late June, with mainly members of the country’s mostly Muslim Rohingya minority on board, the statement said.
Some had reportedly travelled from the huge camps in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar, where more than a million Rohingya refugees who have fled from Rakhine live in squalid conditions.
The statement said that one boat, believed to have been carrying around 250 people, lost contact shortly after departure.
A second boat, reportedly carrying some 280 people, is meanwhile believed to have sunk off Myanmar’s Ayeyarwady coast on July 8.
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