29 killed in Myanmar refugee camp in attack blamed on military junta

Myanmar’s military bombed a camp for displaced people in the northern part of the country, killing 29 people and wounding 56 others, a spokesperson for an ethnic rebel group that controls the area said Tuesday.

The attack late Monday appeared to be the deadliest single assault by the military junta on civilians in six months, fueling further outrage as the armed forces wage a brutal campaign to reclaim rebel-held sections of Myanmar more than two years after a coup.

“I would say this is an act of genocide on our ethnic people,” Naw Bu, a colonel in the Kachin Independence Army, an insurgent group, said by telephone.

Zaw Min Tun, a spokesperson for Myanmar’s military, denied that the army had attacked the camp. He said the devastation “may have been caused by the explosion of a drop bomb storage area” managed by the Kachin rebels.

The victims were from a camp that housed about 500 displaced people near the town of Laiza on the Myanmar-China border, Naw Bu said. Among the dead were 11 children.

Naw Bu said the Kachin Independence Army was weighing the possibility that the attack was carried out with drones,.

Photographs and videos from the camp showed bodies strewn in a jungle. A man was seen carrying the mud-soaked body of a young child out of the destruction. Roofs of houses were blown off. On Tuesday morning, people gathered for a mass funeral.

Since the February 2021 coup, fighting between the army and a large swath of the population who have taken up arms has remained intense. Many of the rebels have taken refuge with ethnic armies such as the Kachin Independence Army, one of Myanmar’s most powerful insurgent forces.