Rasa - A statement Wednesday on the military commander-in-chief’s Facebook page said the Rohingya found in the mass grave had threatened Buddhist villagers and were killed in retaliation, Indian Express reported.
"Some villagers from Inn Din village and security members confessed they killed 10 Bengali terrorists," the military chief’s office said in a Facebook post about the September killings, using a pejorative term for the Rohingya killed in the village.
Last month, Myanmar’s army, which has rejected irrefutable accounts of violence against the Rohingya Muslim community in the state of Rakhine, said officers had found a mass grave in Maungdaw township, where some of the worst atrocities committed by the army troops were reported.
More than 655,000 of Myanmar's Muslim minority have fled across the border to Bangladesh since late August when the Myanmar army launched a sweeping crackdown on Rohingya Muslims in Northern Rakhine state.
The UN has already described the Rohingya as the most persecuted community in the world, calling the situation in Rakhine similar to “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
The Myanmar's government, however, denies committing atrocities against the Rohingya people and has even rejected UN criticism for its “politicization and partiality.”
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra‘ad al-Hussein stressed that attacks on the Rohingya had been “well thought out and planned” and he had asked Myanmar’s de facto leader to do more to stop the military atrocities.
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