A court in Mindon Township has sentenced 27 Rohingyas, including 5 minors, to 2 years imprisonment for travelling without papers.
A source whose close to the judicial officials has told NMG on condition of anonymity that the children will be transferred to Mandalay Juvenile Detention Centre while the others will serve out their sentence at Thayet Prison in Magwe Region.
According to another local source, the group trekked through the mountains without food, but couldn't say for how long. “They asked the locals to give them some rice and send them to the police station instead of beating and killing them,” the man told NMG, asking that his name not be published.
Traffickers reportedly abandoned the group from Mrauk-U, Minbya, Sittwe and Maungdaw Township, who can speak and write Burmese, in the Rakhine Mountains after they travelled from Rakhine State to Magwe Region, where they were arrested in early August.
Authorities in Mindon, Min Hla and Kanma townships in Magwe Region frequently arrest Rohingya, most of whom are stateless despite being born in Burma. Despite the risks, many of them leave Rakhine State because they cannot find work there to support their families.
Before the military's clearance campaigns from 2016 to 2017 forced more than 740,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh and the 2015 crisis, about 1.4 million were living in Burma. A UN fact-finding mission found that the 2017 operation in Rakhine State involved "genocidal acts".
