A local administration official (click here) from a village in Buthidaung township in western Myanmar’s restive Rakhine state was killed by unknown assailants on Friday, while another is missing after being abducted, a township official said.
“A group of people came into Pazonchaung village and took two village officials at around 3 a.m. this morning,” Kyaw Min Tun, township administrator, told RFA’s Myanmar Service.
The official who was killed had his throat slashed 90 feet from his house, and the other one is still missing, he said, adding that the attack could be connected to extremists.
Other recent deaths possibly caused by extremists blamed for a major attack on government guard posts last October have occurred in the area.
An accidental explosion of handmade bombs in Buthidaung’s Theni village on May 4 killed two people and injured three others as victims assembled bombs, according to an announcement the State Counselor’s Office.
Security personnel who checked the village the following day found bags of potassium nitrate, sulfur, coal powder, and other materials used to make bombs near a forest. They launched an investigation of the incident.
Meanwhile, 30 civilians have been killed and 22 others have gone missing in neighboring Maungdaw township since Oct. 9, 2016, when deadly attacks on three local border guard posts occurred....22 August 2018
By Michael Sheen
Rohingya refugee children (click here) who lack proper education in camps in Bangladesh could become a “lost generation”, the United Nations said on Thursday, a year after Myanmar’s army began a crackdown that has forced more than 700,000 people to flee the country.
The lives and futures of more than 380,000 children in refugee camps in Bangladesh are in peril, while hundreds of thousands of Rohingya children still in Myanmar are cut off from aid, said a report by the UN children’s agency (Unicef).
Bangladesh prohibits refugees from receiving formal education, because the government is concerned the predominantly Muslim Rohingya population might become a “permanent fixture”, Unicef spokesman Alastair Lawson-Tancred said.
At the outset of the refugee crisis, aid agencies set up informal learning centres for children aged three to 14, but older teenagers feel alienated and hopeless, Lawson-Tancred said.
“Unquestionably, there is a danger that we might be facing a lost generation,” he said from Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. “Sooner or later, you’re going to have large groups of disaffected youth on your hands.”...
