An Indonesian officer watches over detainees at the Belawan immigration detention centre in Medan city located on Sumatra island, where eight Myanmar Buddhist detainees were killed by Rohingya refugees inside the detention centre on April 5.
A fatal brawl between ethnic groups from Myanmar in an Indonesian detention centre was triggered by the alleged sexual assault of three women of a group, police said yesterday.
Eight Myanmar Buddhists were killed in the fight that broke out with members of Myanmar’s Rohingya minority in the overcrowded centre in Belawan, North Sumatra on April 5, a police report said.
National police spokesman Boy Rafli Amar confirmed the report’s findings.
“The Belawan police forces are still investigating the case,” he said. A leader of the Rohingya group reported the alleged assaults on the women to a warden Thursday, but the Buddhist alleged perpetrators were only slapped and verbally reprimanded, the report said.
The Buddhist group, which had been detained for illegal fishing in Indonesian waters, retaliated but was outnumbered when violence broke out, and eight of them were killed, it said.
North Sumatra police have named 20 of the Rohingyas as suspects in the fight, while 15 injured detainees were being treated at a hospital in Medan, the capital of North Sumatra province. According to the report, the police confiscated makeshift weapons made from pieces of furniture, a knife, a screwdriver and pliers apparently used in the clash as evidence. Myanmar was planning to ask Indonesia to investigate the incident, and find out how the Rohingyas were able to arm themselves, the director of the Myanmar president’s office Hmu Zaw wrote on his Facebook page.
In mainly Buddhist Myanmar, clashes between Buddhist and Muslim communities have claimed more than 200 lives since last year.
In May, clashes between Buddhists and Muslims of the Rohingya ethnic minority in the western state of Rakhine left at least 167 people dead and an estimated 125,000 homeless.
On March 20, 43 people were killed and 86 injured in the centre of the country, around 120 kilometres south of Mandalay, in rioting with a different Muslim group sparked by an argument in a gold shop.
Indonesian police have called for separation between Rohingyas and Buddhists from Myanmar at a number of detention centres in North Sumatra, and increased security at the Belawan centre.
Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa told reporters that a number of detained Rohingyas were awaiting assessment of their refugee status by the
UNHCR.