Fear stalks Rohingya refugee camps after murders

Bloodstains still mark the spot where assassins gunned down Mohib Ullah, an activist who was a leading voice for the 850,000 Rohingya living in fear in Bangladeshi refugee camps.

In the weeks since the murder, a senior member of the now-shellshocked volunteer group that Ullah headed has received phone calls telling him he’ll be next. And he’s not alone.

“They can hunt you down the way they have brazenly shot dead our leader and so many people,” Noor, too frightened to give his real name or be filmed, told AFP.

“They”, he believes, are members of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), an insurgent group fighting the Myanmar military but also thought to be behind a wave of killings and criminal activity in the camps.

ARSA has denied it killed Ullah.

Most of the Rohingya have been in the camps since 2017 when they fled a brutal military offensive in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, where the predominantly Muslim minority are reviled and seen as illegal immigrants.

Refusing to go back until they are assured of security and equal rights, the refugees remain stuck in bamboo-and-tarp shacks with no work, poor sanitation and little education for their children.

Overflowing latrines fill narrow mud lanes with excrement in monsoon season, and fires can rip through the flimsy homes in minutes during the hot summers.

By day the Bangladesh authorities provide some security. But at night the camps become the domain of gangs -- allegedly linked to ARSA -- that traffic millions of dollar worth of methamphetamine from Myanmar.