Rescuers said Thursday as many as 17 people died when a boat sank this week carrying more than 50 refugees from Rohingya trying to flee Myanmar's Rakhine state, where this community is facing state-sponsored persecution and genocide.
Annually, thousands of Rohingya people try to enter Malaysia and Indonesia, with turbulent sea voyages from camps in Bangladesh.
According to a rescuer Byar La from the Shwe Yaung Metta Foundation in the town of Sittwe, more than 50 people were thought to be on the boat heading for Malaysia when it got into trouble in heavy seas Sunday night.
"We found 17 dead bodies... as of yesterday," he told AFP, adding that "we found eight men alive. Police have taken them for questioning."
Rescuers are still trying to find those unaccounted for, he said, though the exact number on board is not known.
Rakhine in Buddhist-majority Myanmar is home to around 600,000 Rohingya Muslims, who are considered migrants from Bangladesh and are denied citizenship and freedom of movement.
A Myanmar military crackdown in 2017 forced some 750,000 Rohingya to flee Rakhine for Bangladesh following widespread accounts of murder, arson and rape.
This incident was reported just a day after 41 people lost their lives when a migrant ship with a total of 45 people including three children sank off Lampedusa island in Italy Wednesday, according to the rescuers.
The boat departed from Sfax in Tunisia and sank within hours while it was on its way to Italy, according to a group of four people who survived the shipwreck.
Reports indicate that the survivors — three men and a woman — are from the Ivory Coast and Guinea and arrived island of Lampedusa Wednesday.
As many as 1,800 people died this year while entering Europe from North Africa.
According to the Tunisian authorities, the port city of Sfax — located about 80 miles (130km) from Lampedusa — is an important gateway for the migrants entering Europe hoping to get a better life.
The survivors noted that their boat left Sfax Thursday last week, but it sank within hours adding that they were rescued by a cargo ship and then transferred to an Italian coast guard vessel.
On Sunday, the Italian coast guard reported two shipwrecks but it was not clear whether the vessel of the survivors was among one of those.
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