Boats carrying more than 500 members of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim community washed ashore in western Indonesia on Sunday, officials said. They warned that thousands more are believed to be stranded at sea.
Steve Hamilton, deputy chief of mission at the International Organization for Migration in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, said his teams were racing to the Aceh province sub-district of Seunuddon, where the boats landed. Of the four boats found, three had apparently been abandoned by the smugglers and the other ran out of fuel, he said.
Most of those on the boats were Rohingya, but there were also some Bangladeshis on board, Mr. Hamilton said.
Attacks on Rohingyas in the last three years have sparked one of the biggest exoduses of boat people since the Vietnam War, sending 100,000 people fleeing, according to Chris Lewa, director of the Arakan Project.
