Thousands of Rohingya homes burn as fire sweeps Bangladesh camps

Hundreds of shanties gutted, leaving thousands homeless, as devastating fire races through the sprawling camps.

A huge blaze that ripped through a sprawling Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh has forced at least 50,000 people to flee and left seven people dead, officials and aid workers said, in the biggest fire to hit the shanty settlement to date. Nearly one million of the persecuted Muslim minority from Myanmar – many of whom fled a military crackdown in their homeland in 2017 – live in cramped and squalid conditions at the camps in the southeastern Cox’s Bazar district. It is the third fire to hit the camps in four days.