1,642 Rohingyas sail for Bhasan Char from Chattogram

Rohingya refugees board a Bangladesh Navy ship to be transported to the island of Bhashan Char in Chittagong on December 4, 2020.

A total of 1,642 Rohingyas sailed from Chattogram to Bhasan Char, an island in the Bay of Bengal under Hatiya upazila of Noakhali on Friday morning.
With this, the process of relocating Rohingyas from the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar to Bhasan Char has begun. At about 10:20am on Friday they started heading towards Bhasan Char, said Lieutenant Commander MK Zaman Shamim of Bangladesh Navy.
He said that a convoy of 19 vessels was being involved to transfer the Rohingyas. Five navy ships and one army ship were ferrying the 1,642 Rohingyas and one navy ship was on stand-by to provide back-up in case of an emergency.
Four speed boats, four country boats, and two navy and two coast guard boats were escorting the six ships. Naval vessels Shah Paran and Shah Makhdum carrying 1,019 luggage reached Bhasan Char on Thursday, said the Navy officer.
The Rohingyas were boarding the ships from three points of departure.
Armed personnel of Bangladesh Navy were in charge of ensuring security of the ships carrying them.
Earlier on Thursday, the Rohingyas reached Chattogram from Cox’s Bazar, where they had been staying since 2017. They stayed overnight at BF base Zahur in Chattogram.
The Navy had prepared Tk 3,100 crore housing project, funded with public money, after some 750,000 Rohingyas fled a military campaign in Myanmar’s Rakhine state and took shelter in Cox’s Bazar in the months following August 2017.
They joined some 300,000 other Rohingyas who had fled decades of violence in Rakhine. More than 1.1 million refugees were living in Cox’s Bazar.
New Age