Survivors’ tales of a massacre in Myanmar | BBC News

It is notoriously difficult to piece together what is happening in Myanmar’s civil war.

But the BBC has managed to construct a picture of what happened on the evening of 5 August through a series of exclusive interviews with more than a dozen Rohingya survivors who escaped to Bangladesh, and the videos they shared.

All of the survivors – unarmed Rohingya civilians – recount hearing many bombs exploding over a period of two hours.

While most described the bombs being dropped by drones, a weapon increasingly being used in Myanmar, some said they were hit by mortars and gunfire.

Survivors’ videos analysed by BBC Verify show the riverbank covered in bloodied bodies, many of them women and children.

There’s no verified count of the number of people killed, but multiple eyewitnesses have told the BBC they saw scores of bodies.

Survivors said they were attacked by the Arakan Army, one of the strongest insurgent groups in Myanmar which in recent months has driven the military out of nearly all of Rakhine State.

The AA declined to be interviewed but its spokesman Khaing Tukha denied the accusation and responded to the BBC’s questions with a statement which said “the incident did not occur in areas controlled by us”.

He also accused Rohingya activists of staging the massacre and falsely accusing the AA.

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