Two Rohingya men killed in gunfight with police

DHAKA: Two Rohingya men and a local Bangladeshi resident suspected of being drug dealers have been killed in a gunfight with police near a refugee camp in southeastern Bangladesh, police said.

Officer Pradip Kumar Das said the gunfight took place yesterday morning when the police took the trio, arrested on Wednesday, to a hillside location in Teknaf sub-district where they admitted to having amassed drugs and arms.

The cache was more than 350km southeast of the capital Dhaka.

A gunfight ensued as police approached the hideout.

Other members of the criminal gang fired their guns, and the lawmen retaliated with bullets in self-defence, leaving three people dead, the officer said.

Two of them are Rohingya Muslims who used to live in Balukhali refugee camp, Das said, adding that four policemen were also wounded in the gunfight.

Police seized three guns and six bullets from the scene.

Bangladesh has been hosting more than one million Rohingya in refugee camps in southeastern Cox’s Bazar district after they fled persecution in neighbouring Myanmar.

Of them, nearly 750,000 crossed the border after Myanmar’s military launched a crackdown against the ethnic minority group in August 2017.

Earlier on Monday, UN human rights experts in a statement urged the Bangladeshi government for impartial investigations into killings of at least four refugees in reported gunfights with police in response to murder of a Bangladeshi man last month. — dpa