At least 15 people have been killed in a massive fire that ripped through a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh, while at least 400 remain missing, the UN refugee agency says.
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"It is massive, it is devastating," said UNHCR's Johannes Van der Klaauw, who joined a Geneva briefing virtually from Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Tuesday.
"We still have 400 people unaccounted for, maybe somewhere in the rubble," he said.
He said the UNHCR had reports of more than 550 people injured and about 45,000 displaced.
Bangladeshi officials are investigating the cause of the blaze even as officials, aid workers and families sift through the debris looking for further victims.
The fire ripped through the Balukhali camp near the southeastern town of Cox's Bazar late on Monday, burning through thousands of shanties as people scrambled to save their meagre possessions.
"Everything has gone. Thousands are without homes," Aman Ullah, a Rohingya refugee from the Balukhali camp, told Reuters.
"The fire was brought under control after six hours but some parts of the camp could be seen smoking all night long."
Police have so far confirmed seven deaths.
"The cause of the fire is still unknown" and authorities were investigating the matter, Zakir Hossain Khan, a senior police official told Reuters by telephone from the camps.
Sanjeev Kafley, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies's delegation head in Bangladesh, said more than 17,000 shelters had been destroyed and tens of thousands of people displaced.
More than a thousand Red Cross staff and volunteers worked with fire services to extinguish the blaze, spread over four sections of the camp containing roughly 124,000 people, he said.
That represents about one-tenth of an estimated one million Rohingya refugees in the area, Kafley said.
Some witnesses said that barbed wire fencing around the camp trapped many people, hurting some and leading international humanitarian agencies to call for its removal.
Humanitarian organisation Refugees International, which estimated 50,000 people had been displaced, said the extent of the damage may not be known for some time.
"Many children are missing, and some were unable to flee because of barbed wire set up in the camps," it said in a statement.
The vast majority of the people in the camps fled Myanmar in 2017 amid a military-led crackdown on the Rohingya that UN investigators said was executed with "genocidal intent", charges Myanmar denies.
Australian Associated Press
