At least one person has died and 10 people have been injured in central Myanmar after Buddhist gangs set fire to hundreds of homes and overrun two mosques.
Tuesday’s flare-up in Okkan, 110km north of Yangon, is the latest anti-Muslim violence to shake the Southeast Asian nation since late March.
In Chauk Tal, an outlying village, leaping flames still rose on Tuesday night from the remains of several fiercely burning structures, while distressed villagers cried and hurled buckets of water to try and douse the flames.
Residents said as many as 400 Buddhists armed with bricks and sticks rampaged through the area.
“We hadn’t really seen [violence] in this central part,” said Al Jazeera’s Scott Heidler, reporting from Bangkok. “[The violence] is definitely spreading; in this latest incident troops and security forces had to come in to prevent any more violence. You can view what’s going on in Myanmar as a tinderbox.”
Eighteen people are reported to have been arrested.
The mobs targeted Muslim shops and ransacked two mosques; about 20 riot police were later deployed to guard one of them, a single-story structure, which had its doors broken and windows smashed.
In Okkan, two mosques were overrun and looted, while more than 100 Muslim homes in three nearby villages were torched in arson attacks.
“They came around 1pm and most of the people were from this town, not from outside. There were around 50 of them,” said Khin Maung Than, a 60-year-old shopkeeper in Okkan.
