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KABUL (SW): Rights group Amnesty International has released satellite images which it says show an "orchestrated campaign" to burn Rohingya villages in western Myanmar.
The group has said this was evidence security forces were trying to push the minority Muslim group out of the country.
Amnesty said it had new evidence based on fire-detection data, satellite imagery, photos and videos, as well as interviews with eye-witnesses, of "an orchestrated campaign of systematic burnings" targeting Rohingya villages for almost three weeks.
"The evidence is irrefutable – the Myanmar security forces are setting northern Rakhine State ablaze in a targeted campaign to push the Rohingya people out of Myanmar. Make no mistake: this is ethnic cleansing," said Tirana Hassan, the group's crisis response director.
Amnesty said security forces would surround a village, shoot people as they fled and burn down their houses, describing the acts as "crimes against humanity". It said it had detected at least 80 major fires in inhabited areas since 25 August, following attacks on police posts by the rebel Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (Arsa).
No fires of this magnitude had been seen in similar periods over the last four years, Amnesty added.
The rights group said it had also received credible reports of Rohingya militants burning homes of Buddhist ethnic Rakhine but had been unable to verify them.
According to the BBC, there were at least a million members of the Rohingya ethnic group living in Myanmar, most of them Muslim, though some are Hindu. They are thought to have their origins in what is now Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, but many have been present in Myanmar for centuries, it added.
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