September
27, 2017
The
bodies were laid out in rows on a grassy field in Kamaungseik, northern Rakhine
State yesterday, as the cries and wails of relatives and friends who came to
identify them could be heard.
Myanmar
authorities yesterday displayed the bodies of Hindu villagers they say were
killed by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a Muslim terrorist group
that attacked 30 border police outposts on 25 August.
Security
forces found 45 Hindu villagers in mass graves in northern Rakhine state this
week, many of them with their throats slit or their limbs cut off.
Information
from a group of Hindu women from Kamaungseik Village who are currently being
sheltered in Bangladesh, led to the discovery of the bodies.
“We
watched as they tied each person, hands behind their back and also legs … They
cut all their throats and pushed them into a pit,” said one of the women, Bina
Bala, 22, adding that the women were spared after promising to convert to
Islam.
Border
guard police were able to find several mass graves.
“We
informed the border guard force about the information we got from the Hindu
women who were abducted to Bangladesh by terrorists and followed the paths
based on the information and found the ground where the bodies were buried,”
said U Ni Maw, a Hindu from the Yebawkya Village to local and foreign
journalists.
A
group of reporters was flown yesterday from Yangon to northern Rakhine State to
see the bodies laid out on the grass, and to hear from those who found them
after information about the massacre filtered back from Hindus who have sought
refuge from the violence in Bangladesh.
“We
followed the paths based on the information we got from the other side,” police
officer Okkar Ko told reporters at the scene.
“We
found where the soil wasn’t normal and then when we dug up the ground, the
smell came out.”
The
latest violence in Rakhine state erupted on Aug. 25, when ARSA extremist
terrorists attacked 30 police posts and an army camp, killing about 12 people.
Hours
later, ARSA extremist terrorists came to the Hindu village of Ye Baw Kya,
gathered up about 100 people, marched them away through their fields and killed
them with knives, the Hindu villagers says. The military response to the
terrorist attacks has driven 480,000 Rohingya refugees to Bangladesh, according
to the UN and drawn U.N. accusations of ethnic cleansing by the army.
Myanmar
denies its forces are fighting terrorists ruthlessly. For the government, the
proof of the terrorists’ brutality is plain to see, lying in rows by the mass
graves just outside the village of Ye Baw Kya.
“This
is terrorism,” Minister for Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement, Win Myat
Aye, who visited the site on Tuesday, told Reuters.
Some
villagers have said the ARSA terrorists suspected Hindus of being on the side
of the government and acting as government spies. In late August, Reuters
reporters in Bangladesh interviewed a group of Hindu women from the village who
said their male loved ones were killed by Rakhine Buddhists.
Three
of the same women told Reuters this week that Muslims who brought them to
Bangladesh had ordered them to say it was Buddhist vigilantes who had done the
killing.
The
three – who individually recounted closely matching stories – said that on 25
August, they and about 100 other Hindus were marched by masked men to the area
of the mass graves.
They
were later able to identify some of the masked men as Muslims, although the
women said the men spoke several languages they could not identify, besides the
dialect spoken by both Muslims and Hindus in the area. They said the attackers
had objected to official identity cards given to Hindus but not Muslims, saying
Hindus should not have them. The victims were blindfolded, with their hands
tied and had their throats slit, said Kyaw Maung Maung Thien, hospital
superintendent in Maungtaw, who examined the bodies. “The evidence points to a
massacre by the ARSA terrorists,” he said.
GNLM,
Reuters
Ref;
The Global New Light of Myanmar
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