DHAKA: At least 6,700 Rohingya were killed in the month after violence broke out in Myanmar in August, said a report of Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), an international medical humanitarian organization.

Based on surveys of refugees in Bangladesh, the number is much higher than Myanmar's official figure of 400.

It was "the clearest indication yet of the widespread violence" by Myanmar authorities, BBC quoted MSF.

The Myanmar military blames the violence on "terrorists" and has denied any wrongdoing.

More than 647,000 Rohingya have fled into Bangladesh since August, MSF says.

The aid group's survey found that at least 9,000 Rohingya died in Myanmar, also known as Burma, between 25 August and 24 September.
"In the most conservative estimations" at least 6,700 of those deaths have been caused by violence, including at least 730 children under the age of five, according to MSF.
Previously, the armed forces stated that around 400 people had been killed, most of them described as Muslim terrorists.

There have been plenty of detailed reports by journalists and researchers, based on interviews conducted with refugees, which make it hard to dispute that terrible human rights abuses took place at the hands of the security forces.

But many of these reports focussed on the worst cases; there are several media reports about a massacre at one village called Tula Toli. Some Rohingya I interviewed told me they had fled in fear of violence, but had not actually experienced it.

This well-researched figure by MSF suggests the operation conducted by the military was brutal enough to raise the possibility of taking a case to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity.

The military crackdown began on 25 August after Rohingya Arsa militants attacked more than 30 police posts.

The government's assertions contradicted evidence seen by BBC correspondents. The United Nations human rights chief has said it seems like "a textbook example of ethnic cleansing".

"What we uncovered was staggering, both in terms of the numbers of people who reported a family member died as a result of violence, and the horrific ways in which they said they were killed or severely injured," MSF Medical Director Sidney Wong said.

"The numbers of deaths are likely to be an underestimation as we have not surveyed all refugee settlements in Bangladesh and because the surveys don't account for the families who never made it out of Myanmar," Wong added.

However, MSF also warned there was still very limited access for aid groups into Rakhine state.

BDST: 1243 HRS, DEC 14, 2017
SI