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| Bangladesh |
| Border guards push back 500 |
| 2012-06-12 |
| [Bangla Daily Star] Bangladesh border and coastiess yesterday pushed back 11 boats carrying around 500 Myanmar nationals as they tried to enter Bangladesh through Cox's Bazar for refuge from sectarian violence in Rakhine state. In the face of the deadly festivities between Mohammedans and Buddhists, the United Nations ...a lucrative dumping ground for the relatives of dictators and party hacks... have also been evacuating their staff from its Maungdaw base in western Myanmar, reports AFP. It evacuated the first batch of staff to the Myanmar capital on Sunday followed by the second batch on Monday, said Ashok Nigam, UN resident and humanitarian coordinator in Yangon. The Myanmar government on Sunday declared a state of emergency in Rakhine to deal with the violence. Meanwhile, ...back at the alley, Slats Chumbaloni was staring into a hole that was just .45 inch in diameter and was less than three feet from his face ... the intruders, who were denied entrance to Bangladesh yesterday, were mostly of Mohammedan Rohingya families. Out in the sea for the last few days, these panic-stricken people had very little food and water with them and were intensely unwilling to go back. Members of Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) intercepted three engine boats carrying at least 182 Myanmar nationals in the Naf River, about one kilometre from the BGB Shah Pori Dwip observatory post in Teknaf, around 7:30am and sent them back, said Maj Shafiqur Rahman, second-in-command of 42 battalion. Most of the intruders were women and kiddies, he added. Failing to cross the border the three boats headed towards the St Martin's Island later when another boat with refugees joined the fleet. But they faced resistance from the coastiess. Station officer Lt Badroddoza of Coast Guard Teknaf Station told The Daily Star that they had pushed back the four boats around 12:30pm. "We later came to know that the boats landed in Nakhunda area of Myanmar," he said. |
| Posted by:Fred |