YANGON: A Rohingya Muslim armed group on Friday denied a report that its members killed scores of Hindu civilians in August last year, amid a surge in violence in Myanmar’s troubled Rakhine State.
In a report this week, rights group Amnesty International documented in detail alleged atrocities by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) near a remote village in Rakhine State.
The report, citing witnesses, including Hindu women who said they were abducted by ARSA insurgents, said fighters from the group killed as many as 99 Hindus near Kha Maung Seik after launching the raids on security posts on August 25.
“We categorically deny all of these unjustifiable and careless serious criminal accusations mentioned in the said report,” ARSA said in a statement signed by its leader Ata Ullah and posted on social media network Twitter late on Friday.
A military response to the Rohingya insurgent attacks pushed nearly 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee from northern Rakhine to neighboring Bangladesh, which the United Nations and aid agencies called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.
Myanmar rejected the accusation of ethnic cleansing, as well as most of the accounts of killings and rape recounted by many of the refugees arriving in Bangladesh.
