Bangladesh relocates 2,000 more Rohingya refugees to remote island

Dhaka, Feb 16: Bangladesh on Monday sent around 2,000 Rohingya refugees to the remote Bhashan Char island, which is designed to accommodate 1 lakh people.

More than 7,000 refugees, including Monday's group, have been relocated to the island since December.

Human rights groups have criticised the move and claimed that refugees are being relocated against their will.

They boarded boats at the port of Chattogram and headed to Bhasan Char - an island 21 miles off Bangladesh's southeast coast, M Mozammel Haque, a commander of the Bangladesh Navy, told reporters.

Bhasan Char was only discovered around 20 years ago and has been largely uninhabited since then.

It is regularly submerged by monsoon rain but now has flood protections, which the Bangladeshi government insists make it safe.

Officials have spent more than £80m on building homes, hospitals and mosques there for the Rohingya Muslims, who fled Buddhist-majority Myanmar in 2017.

The island has enough facilities to accommodate 1,00,000 refugees, just 10 per cent of the million Rohingyas now living in Bangladesh after military crackdowns in their native country.