Hundreds of Migrants Missing Off Malaysia’s Coast

Asia Pacific|Hundreds of Migrants Missing Off Malaysia’s Coast

The authorities in Malaysia said on Monday that hundreds of migrants were missing at sea, including dozens who were on a boat that capsized over the weekend carrying members of the Rohingya ethnic minority.

The details of the capsizing and the missing migrants were reported by Malaysia’s Coast Guard and confirmed by two officials in the Malaysian border state of Kedah.

One of the officials, First Admiral Romli Mustafa of the Coast Guard, said the boat is believed to have capsized with about 70 people on Saturday near Langkawi, an island off Malaysia’s west coast near the border with Thailand.

The migrants had set off for Malaysia from western Myanmar about two weeks ago in a wooden boat carrying about 300 people, the Langkawi District Police said in a statement.

On Thursday, the passengers were transferred to two other boats, the police said. One of them, carrying about 70 people, capsized on Saturday. The other boat, carrying about 230 others, was still missing as of Monday.

The police said seven bodies had been recovered from waters near the site of the capsizing, including six women from Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority, one of the most persecuted ethnic groups in the world. Thirteen survivors were detained, including 11 Rohingya people and two others from Bangladesh.

More than a million Rohingya have been expelled from western Myanmar to neighboring Bangladesh in recent years. Some of them have attempted boat crossings to Malaysia from Myanmar, where they face ethnic persecution, or from Bangladesh, where they live in refugee camps.

Babar Baloch, a spokesman for the United Nations Refugee Agency, said that U.N. officials were working to verify details of the capsizing and the missing boats.